Practicing geoethics in Earth system modeling

Geoethics is commonly discussed as a field concerned with principles, responsibilities, and normative guidance for geoscientists in their engagement with society and the environment. In this contribution, I take a complementary perspective and explore geoethics as it is lived and negotiated in everyday scientific coordination. Drawing on ethnographic insights from my work as process coordinator within the German Earth System Modeling initiative natESM, I approach geoethics as a situated practice that unfolds in concrete decisions, relationships, and institutional processes rather than as a fixed moral framework.

I focus on moments where technical, organizational, political, and ethical considerations intersect in particularly tangible ways. These include decisions about which numerical models can be sustainably supported within a national infrastructure, the deliberate shift of technical responsibility toward Research Software Engineers to ensure long-term maintainability, and the continuous effort to keep scientific communities involved even when specific models cannot be fully integrated. In this context, the sprint process becomes a central ethnographic site. It brings together different professional cultures, expectations, and temporalities, especially those of scientists and RSEs, and turns collaboration itself into a space where responsibility, care, and authority are constantly renegotiated.

Particular attention is given to the emotional and political work involved in communicating limits, such as defined breakpoints in projects, uncertainty about future trajectories, and the need for redirection. These moments are rarely framed as ethical decisions, yet they profoundly affect professional identities and senses of belonging within the Earth system modeling community. They gain further complexity in an international context shaped by instability and asymmetry, where long-standing partners may face institutional uncertainty while their expertise remains crucial for transnational collaboration.

From this perspective, geoethics appears less as a matter of compliance or formal codes of conduct and more as a form of relational and infrastructural work. It involves balancing care for people, responsibility for public resources, and commitments to scientific quality and sustainability in situations where no solution is purely technical.

By foregrounding coordination and sprint-based collaboration as ethnographic sites of ethical practice, I argue for a broadened understanding of geoethics that includes the mundane and often invisible labor of aligning infrastructures, expertise, and expectations in contemporary geoscience. I propose political ethnography as a way to make visible how ethical responsibility in large-scale scientific initiatives is not only articulated in principles, but enacted in processes.