Preparing humanitarians to address ethical problems.

Infectious disease outbreaks represent potentially catastrophic threats to those affected by humanitarian crises. High transmissibility, crowded living conditions, widespread co-morbidities, and a lack of intensive care capacity may amplify the effects of the outbreak on already vulnerable populations and present humanitarian actors with intense ethical problems. We argue that there are significant and troubling gaps in ethical awareness at the level of humanitarian praxis. Though some ethical guidance does exist most of it is directed at public health experts and fails to speak to the day-to-day ethical challenges confronted by frontline humanitarians. In responding to infectious disease outbreaks humanitarian workers are likely to grapple with complex dilemmas opening the door to moral distress and burnout

Ethical guidance or epistemological injustice? The quality and usefulness of ethical guidance for humanitarian workers and agencies.

This paper explores the quality and usefulness of ethical guidance for humanitarian aid workers and their agencies. We focus specifically on public health emergencies, such as COVID-19. The authors undertook a literature review and gathered empirical data through semi-structured focus group discussions amongst front-line workers from health clinics in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh and in the Abyei Special Administrative Area, South Sudan. The purpose of the project was to identify how front-line workers respond to ethical challenges, including any informal or local decision-making processes, support networks, or habits of response.The research findings highlighted a dissonance between ethical guidance and the experiences of front-line humanitarian health workers. They suggest the possibility: (1) that few problems confronting front-line workers are conceived, described, or resolved as ethical problems; and (2) of significant dissonance between available, allegedly practically oriented guidance (often produced by academics in North America and Europe), and the immediate issues confronting front-line workers. The literature review and focus group data suggest a real possibility that there is, at best, a significant epistemic gulf between those who produce ethical guidelines and those engaged in real-time problem solving at the point of contact with people. At worst they suggest a form of epistemic control-an imposition of cognitive shapes that shoehorn the round peg of theoretical preoccupations and the disciplinary boundaries of western academies into the square hole of front-line humanitarian practice. [Abstract copyright: © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.

Ethics, climate change and health – a landscape review [version 1; peer review: 2 approved]

Anthropogenic climate change is unequivocal, and many of its physical health impacts have been identified, although further research is required into the mental health and wellbeing effects of climate change. There is a lack of understanding of the importance of ethics in policy-responses to health and climate change which is also linked to the lack of specific action-guiding ethical resources for researchers and practitioners. There is a marked paucity of ethically-informed health input into economic policy-responses to climate change—an area of important future work. The interaction between health, climate change and ethics is technically and theoretically complex and work in this area is fragmentary, unfocussed, and underdeveloped. Research and reflection on climate and health is fragmented and plagued by disciplinary silos and exponentially increasing literature means that the field cannot be synthesised using conventional methods. Reviewing the literature in these fields is therefore methodologically challenging. Although many of the normative challenges in responding to climate change have been identified, available theoretical approaches are insufficiently robust, and this may be linked to the lack of action-guiding support for practitioners. There is a lack of ethical reflection on research into climate change responses. Low-HDI (Human Development Index) countries are under-represented in research and publication both in the health-impacts of climate change, and normative reflection on health and climate change policy. There is a noticeable lack of ethical commentary on a range of key topics in the environmental health literature including population, pollution, transport, energy, food, and water use. Serious work is required to synthesise the principles governing policy responses to health and climate change, particularly in relation to value conflicts between the human and non-human world and the challenges presented by questions of intergenerational justice