# Ethical Challenges in Scientific Studies Within One Health

## TL;DR

This paper reviews the emerging field of One Health ethics and highlights the need to integrate ethics into scientific studies that aim to improve health for humans, animals, and ecosystems.

## Contribution

The paper identifies key ethical challenges in One Health and proposes future directions for developing this underexplored field.

## Key findings

- Ethics has been largely overlooked in One Health approaches despite its importance.
- Three future trends include ethical decision models and bridging anthropocentrism with ecocentrism.
- The field needs more scholars to address complex global health challenges.

## Abstract

The purpose of this short literature review is to present the state of art in One Health ethics, a new field working with ethics in One Health approaches. These approaches have focused on promoting health for humans, animals, plants, and ecosystems mainly in a scientific way. Ethics has often been left out. The goal is to summarize the main findings of the limited ethics discussion in the field and propose the future way forward for the field.

There have been several calls for ethics, and the main discussion has mainly focused on (1) the ethical imperative in One Health, (2) the ethical value of ecosystems, (3) normative aspects of health, (4) core ethical concepts, and (5) ethical decision models.

For the next decade this field needs to be fully developed and included as a core science within the One Health approaches. To be able to solve the complex problems these approaches are facing, such as the triple crisis (climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss), more scholars need to work with One Health ethics, which still is a rather underdeveloped field of ethics. Three future trends for the field of One Health ethics were proposed; 1) to find ethical decision models, 2) to bridge the gap between anthropocentrism, zoocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism, and 3) how to balance valuation between different species, organisms or levels, or ethics and economy.