There is growing awareness of the importance of having all sectors of society adapt to face a range of global environmental and climate challenges, taking into account intergenerational justice.
These challenges require developing an encompassing framework for research and innovation (R&I) to address environmental and climate ethics and integrity issues, which relate not only to R&I involving potentially significant environmental and climate repercussions (e.g. R&I in the area of electro-magnetic fields), but also R&I specifically aiming to develop knowledge and technologies to address environmental and climate challenges (e.g. geoengineering or biotechnology in food systems).
RE4GREEN’s main goal is to contribute to a European Research Area (ERA) ethics and integrity framework for research and innovation activities designed to support the transition to a sustainable economy and society as envisioned by the European Green Deal.
While R&I has too often been part of the problem of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss, a central pillar of the European Green Deal and associated legislation is to promote new technologies and sustainable solutions to reach net zero emissions in the EU by 2050, and advance a range of other climate and environmental objectives.
Based on a bottom-up approach that uses the social lab methodology to reflect diverse stakeholder expertise, RE4GREEN will develop operational research ethics and integrity guidelines, recommendations and training materials and programmes for researchers, ethics and integrity experts as well as advisors and ethics review boards to make sure R&I activities more holistically contribute solutions toward the Green Transition.
ECSA activities and milestones
Specifically RE4GREEN partners will:
- Identify, analyse and assess key and cross-cutting environmental and climate ethics and integrity challenges.
- Build a community for sustained bottom-up engagement, awareness raising, and exchange across stakeholders of the ERA about environmental and climate ethics
- Produce and/or adapt operational (“how-to”) ethics and integrity guidelines and elaborate and disseminate policy recommendations, to support researchers, research ethics committee members and integrity experts, research managers, funders and policy-makers, to account for environmental and climate impacts in R&I.
- Develop traditional and online training materials on ethical and integrity aspects in climate and environmental technologies using micromodules that can be tailored to different target groups.
