Climate Change and Pandemics – Co-Producing Crises: How can Bioethics be Enriched by Critical Forms of Scholarship, Histories, and Theories?
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This article was originally published on the Wellcome Open Research portal, an Open Research publishing platform that provides all Wellcome researchers with a place to rapidly publish any results they think are worth sharing.
The text below is as it appeared on 05 November 2025.
Abstract
Bioethics has become an increasingly influential discipline in shaping global health interventions. This is partly because bioethics can establish practical ethical guidelines by combining normative and empirical approaches. However, bioethics scholars have also criticised its limited scope, emphasising the need to re-centre the inherent interconnection between ethics and politics. The climate emergency and pandemics, as crises that coexist and disproportionately affect the global South, compel us to consider these critiques of bioethics.
Outside of bioethics, other academic disciplines have produced important critiques of global health, often drawing on critical social theories and methods. While some approaches draw on such critical scholarship, these critiques often remain separate from mainstream bioethics. This raises significant questions: How could bioethics be informed by critical approaches? How could bioethical approaches not only be strengthened to guide current research but also set the moral and ethical trajectory of research and services regarding pandemics and the climate crisis, thus making bioethics more robust and relevant?
Drawing on insights from an interdisciplinary engagement with scholars working across pandemics, climate change, and bioethics—predominantly voices from the global South—we develop a critical approach for reimagining bioethics in the context of intersecting global crises. We emphasise the distinction between bioethics and more critical scholarly approaches, propose ways to strengthen bioethics by drawing on more critical perspectives, and suggest ways to integrate critical scholarship into bioethical frameworks.
Plain Language Summary
Increasingly, attention is being paid to climate change and pandemics. This is especially so as those in the global South carry an unequal burden of these twin crises. Bioethics as a discipline is also turning its attention to these crises. Yet, it remains hamstrung, with its primary focus often on procedural and regulatory aspects. In this paper, we argue that bioethics can be informed by critical social science to respond effectively to these twin crises.
Other academic fields have developed important criticisms of global health using critical social theories, but these insights often remain separate from mainstream bioethics. This research, drawing mainly on voices from the global South, explores how bioethics could be strengthened by incorporating these critical perspectives. The goal is to make bioethics more relevant and robust for addressing intersecting global crises by better integrating critical scholarship.
Keywords: co-producing crisis, pandemics, climate change, bioethics, global south, critical scholarship
