WHO's criteria for ethical health research priority-setting in the context of climate change

Health research on climate change has increased substantially in recognition of the impact of climate change on human health. This research raises new ethical questions for health research priority-setting, including how to prioritize research on climate change and health versus other types of health research unrelated to climate change, and how to prioritize among different health research projects focused on climate change. In this paper, we focus on the latter. We consider whether the ethical criteria for health research priority-setting recently proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) should be used by funders when allocating resources among health research projects focused on climate change. The WHO criteria were developed in response to imbalances around who controls and sets health research agendas and who benefits from them. The four criteria for ethical research priority-setting are optimizing social value, following fair procedures, respecting special obligations and assessing risks. We first show that these criteria are relevant to priority-setting for research on climate change and health because evidence suggests that the above-mentioned imbalances may exist when allocating resources to climate change and health research. We next assess whether the four criteria can help reduce imbalances in who controls and who benefits from resource allocation to such research. Our analyses indicate that the WHO criteria can help if further specifications are included for research on climate change and health. We provide recommendations for how to further specify the criteria.