Why environmental scientists need ethics training more than ever before

n the face of mounting environmental crises, scientists and decision-makers must often balance complex and competing goals, including mitigating climate change, conserving biodiversity, and supporting human livelihoods (1). These goals sometimes align to produce win–win outcomes for people, animals, and ecosystems—for example, community-based conservation projects or crop-planting incentives that benefit farmers and pollinators. More often, they involve difficult trade-offs (2), such as whether to use land for much-needed agriculture or preserve it for endangered species.

To address such questions, environmental scientists and practitioners must balance values and weigh immediate needs against long-term sustainability. Decisions about how to navigate these challenges depend not only on technical expertise, but also on judgments about which individuals, populations, species, or regions have more social or environmental priority and what our obligations are toward them (3, 4). For example, emerging technologies such as geoengineering raise questions about acceptable risks at planetary scales and who has the authority to make such decisions (5). Similarly, de-extinction technologies are entangled with questions about the manipulation of natural processes, obligations to extinct species, and the allocations of scientific and conservation resources (6). Even more fundamental environmental questions, such as what constitutes a “healthy” ecosystem and how to measure it, are, at their core, decisions about what stakeholders value and what constitutes a “good” ecological state in a changing world (7)........