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Open research questions in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics

35 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 1,591 Environmental Philosophy and Ethics papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • • Incorporate biodiversity audits into school and institutional management • Promote microhabitat development in agricultural and educational settings • Encourage interdisciplinary environmental education • Develop long-term biodiversity monitoring frameworks Declarations (JAAFR Style) • Funding: No external funding was received for this study. • Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest. 80 Syed Sameeah Bushra / Journal on Innovations in Teaching and Learning, Vol 5(1) 2026, 73–82 • Ethical Approval: All observations were conducted using non-invasive methods, ensuring no harm to living organisms.

    Campus Biodiversity as a Pedagogical Tool:An Experiential Agro-Ecological Study in a School Landscape · 2026 · DOI

  • From the underground to the canopy, perspectives can allow for imagined situating, where unexpected views can surface new insights and awareness of places. Whether drawing focus to obscured stories or omitted data (e.g., the ‘shadow emissions’ of forestry, histories of carbon accumulation, or carbon stored within forest soils), perspectives can offer immersive and unexpected framings (relating to the choice of frame within comics (McCloud, 2006)) that may help to disturb commonly held views.

    Forest Carbon Futures: Creative Avenues to Critical Data Literacies at the Confluence of the Ecological and Climate Crises · 2026 · DOI

  • While this account holds that scientific understanding is a process of embodied enactment of scientific knowledge through aesthetic experiences, further work is needed to address questions such as how 4E cognition relates to scientific understanding in sustain- ability research environments, or how phenomenological theories might illuminate understanding beyond disciplinary academic contexts.

    Aesthetic sustainability: relational understanding in conservation research environments · 2026 · DOI

  • This review article analyses the coevolution between science and culture based on bioethics conceived as a reflective and integrative bridge, which is not limited to the formulation of normative principles, but rather guides the processes of deliberation and decision-making, reconfiguring scientific practices toward a more just, responsible, and contextualised scientific culture.

    Bioethics in the Anthropocene: A powerful tool for sustainable development and planetary co-responsibility · 2023 · DOI

  • Soulé's critique of conservation critics for privileging human interests at the expense of wild nature and promoting extinctions requires systematic documentation of specific policy proposals, conservation strategies, or organizational practices from these critics that exemplify this bias. Comparative analysis of outcome differences between human-centered and ecocentric conservation approaches in defined ecosystems is lacking.

    Michael Soulé (1936–2020) on spirituality, ethics, and conservation biology · 2020 · DOI

  • The paper documents that only 0.5% of charitable giving funds biological diversity conservation, but does not analyze how this funding disparity correlates with specific conservation outcomes, species extinction rates, or habitat loss in different regions. Research connecting funding allocation patterns to measurable conservation effectiveness metrics is needed.

    Michael Soulé (1936–2020) on spirituality, ethics, and conservation biology · 2020 · DOI

  • The paper presents Soulé's reinterpretation of the Buddhist non-harm precept through an ecological hunting framework, but lacks empirical validation of this framework's effectiveness in reducing suffering of ungulate populations relative to vegetarian conservation approaches. Comparative data on herbivore population management outcomes under different ethical frameworks in specific ecosystems is absent.

    Michael Soulé (1936–2020) on spirituality, ethics, and conservation biology · 2020 · DOI

  • Soulé's incomplete project on adaptive and resilient socioecological systems requires systematic empirical investigation of how human biological traits (greed, anger, lust, gluttony, sloth) constrain or enable the design of socioecological systems under conditions of increasing human numbers, affluence, and technological power. The specific mechanisms by which evolutionary psychology intersects with conservation ethics to create or prevent system resilience remain unexplored.

    Michael Soulé (1936–2020) on spirituality, ethics, and conservation biology · 2020 · DOI

  • The change to ecologically sound patterns of production and consumption is limited by the dimension of the environmental crisis that has to do with nature as sustenance‐base and does not provide a solution to problems related to what we call the second dimension of the environmental crisis: the changing role of nature as “intuited nature”; and the way people “deal with”; these aspects of the environmental crisis within everyday life.

    Sociology, environment, and modernity: Ecological modernization as a theory of social change · 1992 · DOI

  • In Africa such an approach is more or less forced upon us, as our knowledge of the ecology of animals other than those of economic importance is still sparse—we know, for example, almost nothing about woodlice south of the Sahara; there is, however, a very considerable body of knowledge about the economically significant animals, although it is scattered among a plethora of journals as well as official reports.

    Length, Breadth and Depth: Reflections on the “Ecological Approach”. · 1974 · DOI

  • Because Mary Richmond had a sci entific attitude and was interested in research, the signs of a controlled experiment can be recognized in her suggestion that all possible variables be controlled so that social casework could be studied methodically. is insufficient for a number of reasons; means become con the purposes of practice fused with ends, become obscured, and actual service becomes restricted to those clients who would be best served by our methods, instead of the other way around.

    Purposes and Boundaries–Casework Fifty Years Later · 1973 · DOI

  • However, while conceptual frameworks increasingly acknowledge a plurality of values, empirical indicators to reliably assess these multiple value types and their sub-dimensions remain scarce.

    The Plural Values of Nature scale: An integrated psychometric scale to measure instrumental, intrinsic and relational values. · 2026 · DOI

  • Although these approaches are gaining traction in science, they remain less established in practice, and there is insufficient guidance on how to balance ecological goals with social acceptance, inclusion, and equity.

    Urban rewilding assisted: from spontaneous nature to multifunctional and inclusive nature-based solutions for sustainable cities · 2026 · DOI

  • It lays the groundwork for further research on rewilding and de-extinction for proposing ways to increase the supply of private finance to meet the ever-growing demands for amelioration of the natural environment.

    Accounting, accountability, assurance, financing and governance for rewilding and de-extinction · 2026 · DOI

  • I suggest seed-bombing as an act of thinking and doing recuperation in blasted landscapes, one not limited to a singular event, but a cross-temporal attunement to children's waste relations with particular futures in mind.

    Seed-bombing as recuperative pedagogies: Activating wit(h)nessing in blasted landscapes · 2024 · DOI

  • Although ecological embeddedness—that is, actors’ physical and cognitive anchoring in their ecological environment—can help maintain sustainability ambitions, its collective dynamics and pluralistic moral foundations remain understudied.

    Growing Green: On the Moral Pluralism of Individual and Collective Ecological Embeddedness · 2024 · DOI

  • However, conceptualisations of ‘connections to nature’ are fragmented in theoretical terms and practical application, as empirical research in environmental management literature exploring lay people’s conceptualisations of their personal ‘connections to nature’ is scarce.

    Exploring conceptualisations of ‘connections to nature’ from an environmental management perspective: a case study in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand · 2022 · DOI

  • We provide a framework for whole-of-community rewilding and describe empirical case studies as practical applications of this under-researched restoration tool that land managers can use to improve restoration outcomes.

    Rewilding with invertebrates and microbes to restore ecosystems: Present trends and future directions · 2021 · DOI

  • It finds that the mixture of inductive and deductive reasoning associated with socially-oriented investigations of these systems is lacking on the ecological side, which relies upon induction alone.

    Missing ecology: integrating ecological perspectives with the social-ecological system framework · 2013 · DOI

  • In light of the growing ecological need to find viable alternatives to the chemically dependent lawns, the rationale for changing preferences and behavior modification need to be examined.

    Lawn Control, Lawn Culture, and the Social Marketing of Sustainable Behaviors · 2010 · DOI

  • A negative opinion on the advantages of life in the protected areas within which the Ramsar localities are located was revealed, the result of a lack of information and insufficient knowledge of the environmental and economic functions of wetlands.

    Public awareness of wetlands and their conservation · 2008 · DOI

  • Urban park history in North America tends to focus on political, social, and cultural forces that shaped park design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but does not account for the role of non-human natural forces.

    Restoring Nature: Ecology, Memory, and the Storm History of Vancouver's Stanley Park · 2007 · DOI

  • Abstract: Although the “new” economic geography has explored links between the subdiscipline's traditional areas of study and cultural, institutional, and political realms, environmental issues remain comparatively underresearched within the subdiscipline.

    Prospects for an Environmental Economic Geography: Linking Ecological Modernization and Regulationist Approaches · 2006 · DOI

  • The analytical framework is tributary of complex systems thinking applied tothe field of common property resource management - an innovative approach thatremains unknown of large segments of social scientists in our country.

    Artigo: Conflitos socioambientais em Unidades de Conservação · 2005

  • In ourmodernworldwe have botanists who study plants and zoologists who study animals, but most of them are specialists who do not deal with the ramifications of their limited knowledge.

    Bioethics, the Science of Survival · 1970 · DOI

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35 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 1,591 Environmental Philosophy and Ethics papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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