Climate Change, Health, and the Ethics of Adaptation

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ID: 338476
2026
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Abstract
Abstract This chapter explores the ethical dimensions of climate change adaptation and proposes an agenda for future work in bioethics and related disciplines. Mitigation has dominated climate-and-health discourse despite the reality that climate change is already producing significant health impacts, exacerbating health disparities at local, regional, and global scales. Plus, if the mitigation agenda fails or falls short, these risks, impacts, and inequities will grow more extreme. Thus, adaptation and its ethical challenges remain unjustifiably underexplored. The chapter begins by describing the pathways through which climate change affects human health, explaining how vulnerability and exposure to climate change–related hazards vary within and across populations. It then defines and distinguishes adaptation from mitigation, arguing that adaptation strategies are essential supplements to mitigation efforts and that adaptation planning and policy demands bioethicists’ attention. The chapter identifies and motivates three core sets of ethical challenges: how to allocate resources between mitigation and adaptation; how to balance adaptation goals with other moral and social commitments (including health equity, environmental justice, and the value of and obligations to nonhuman nature); and how to fairly assign responsibility for adaptation at local and global levels. It argues that these challenges cannot be solved through empirical data alone but require normative analysis and argument as well as interdisciplinary collaboration and engagement. The chapter concludes by calling for bioethicists and allied scholars to broaden their disciplinary scope, to engage climate ethics and environmental ethics scholarship, and to consciously integrate human and environmental values into adaptation planning and policy.
Reference Key
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Authors Kyle Ferguson
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Journal Oxford University Press eBooks
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/9780197807262.003.0030
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197807262.003.0030
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