Mitigating global climate change and its environmental impact is a key social responsibility of scientists and should be part of research ethics policies and guidelines.

Abstract

Scientists have both epistemic and social responsibilities. Doing good science and reproducible research work would be a scientist's epistemic responsibility, but what might constitute social responsibility is perhaps broader and more subjective. Here, I posit that mitigation of global climate change (CC) and its environmental impact would be a key contemporary social responsibility of scientists. In their research, diligence in reducing the contribution of their work to greenhouse gas emissions and CC would be morally normative. Furthermore, contributing to tackling CC and its detrimental effects would be befitting of scientists' technical expertise, and is thus an appropriate reciprocative return for the training and resources afforded to them by society (and the environment). Scientists being responsible for tackling CC and its effects can be adequately described by the terms of dimensions of responsibility alluded to by de Melo-Martin and Intemann. As such, there would be no convincing reasons to reject these as important notions that should be incorporated into research ethics guidelines and policies.