Environmentally Sustainable HeAlth REsearch (SHARE): from ‘tool solutionism’ to a context sensitive, just, systems-focused and reflexive approach

Health research is implicated in a range of harmful environmental impacts such as energy and other resource consumption and plastic use and other waste generation.

Numerous tools have been developed to enable and encourage researchers to assess and reduce these impacts, including guidelines, carbon calculators, and certification systems.

However, these tools raise potential ethical, social and practical issues, including tensions with local values when tools are used in different contexts; issues of inequity and injustice, particularly in global health research; and a lack of space for research communities to reflect on possible short- and/or long-term unintended consequences that using such tools might have on wider systems.

This project aims to address these concerns by adopting a multi-country approach, integrating conceptual and normative analysis, qualitative research, and co- design methods to: 1) assess the ethical, social and practical implications of using tools in situated and diverse contexts; 2) identify and evaluate available concepts and normative approaches to develop a context-sensitive, just, systems-focused and reflexive framework for environmentally sustainable health research and tool use; 3) co-design practical resources for research communities to use this framework in practice; and 4) develop a research community of practice to engage research communities with this approach.