Medical ethics in the climate crisis

In this European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME) webinar we will critically examine the implications of the climate crisis for medical ethics and explore potential solutions. We are pleased to invite four distinguished speakers:

• Solomon Benatar: Bioethics for a world facing an existential crisis (Emeritus Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa),

• Bridget Pratt: Socio-ecological justice and reimagining just health systems (Senior Lecturer, Australian Catholic University),

• Joshua Parker: Healthcare exceptionalism and healthcare’s fair share of the burdens of mitigation (PhD candidate, Lancaster University, UK)

• Kristine Bærøe: On how bioethics can be restructured into policy impacting approaches in the face of climate-and environmental crises (Professor, University of Bergen).
  
  Each speaker will present for 10-15 minutes followed by an audience Q&A moderated by Anand Bhopal (PhD candidate, BCEPS).
   

About the speakers:

• Solomon Benatar

  Bio: Solomon Benatar MBChB, DSc (Med), Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Senior Scholar at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and Adjunct Professor Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. He was Head of the Department of Medicine at UCT and Chief Physician at Groote Schuur Hospital from1980-1999, the Founding Director of the UCT Centre for Bioethics (1992-2012) and President of the International Association of Bioethics (2001-2003). He has been invited to lecture at many medical schools globally, and every year from 2000 to 2019 at the University of Toronto. His academic interests have included respiratory medicine, academic freedom, bioethics, human rights, health care systems, global and planetary health – on which he has published widely. Global Health and Global Health Ethics (S Benatar, G Brock Eds) Cambridge University Press was published in 2011 and Global Health: Ethical Challenges, 2^nd edition in 2021. He is an elected Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Medicine (1989) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), and elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London (1981), The Hastings Centre in New York (2004) and of The Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London (2005).

  Bridget Pratt

   Bio: Bridget Pratt is the Mater Senior Lecturer in Healthcare Ethics at the Queensland Bioethics Centre at Australian Catholic University. Previously, she was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and, before that, a Hecht Levi Fellow at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research interests include the ethics of health research and health systems, with a focus on social, ecological, and global justice.

  Joshua Parker

  Bio: Joshua Parker is a PhD candidate in bioethics at Lancaster University. His research focuses on the questions of distributive justice that arise at the intersection of health, healthcare and climate change. His research is funded by a Wellcome Trust Studentship. Joshua is also clinician specialising in General Practice. 

  Kristine Bærøe

  Bio: Kristine Bærøe is a professor at the Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, at the University of Bergen, Norway.  Her background is in philosophy, with a PhD degree in medical ethics. Her research interests include priority setting in health, professional discretion and judgment, social health inequality, research- and researcher ethics, Artificial Intelligence in health, translational ethics, and local and global justice in the face of climate change.