Content area
Full text
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2022) reports with high confidence that climate change has adversely affected the physical and mental health of people around the globe. The IPCC projects that both near-term and long-term ill-health and premature deaths will significantly increase because of climate change and extreme events. The IPCC recommends strengthening health delivery systems and improving system resilience to mitigate and adapt to changing circumstances affecting human health and service delivery.
Strengthening health systems involves a shift in how health care professionals think about and respond to climate-related health problems. Improving understanding of both the direct and indirect effects of climate change on human health is essential. Important considerations include the social and behavioral factors as well as the environmental and institutional contexts that influence exposure pathways and health outcomes (United States Global Change Research Program [USGCRP], 2016). Increases in temperature, precipitation extremes, extreme weather events, and sea level rise expose populations to extreme heat, poor air quality, reduced food and water quality, changes in infectious agents, and population displacement (IPCC, 2022; USGCRP, 2016). How those exposures translate into adverse health outcomes is affected by social determinants and behavioral choices as well as infrastructure conditions, geography, agricultural and livestock use, and ecosystem changes (USGCRP, 2016).
The importance of educating health care professionals on the implications of climate change on health has been gaining widespread support during the past 5 years. In 2018, the International Council of Nurses called for national nurses' associations to embed climate change-related knowledge into nursing curricula and continuing education. The American Medical Association (2024) has declared climate change a public health crisis and adopted a policy in 2019 supporting education on the basic science of climate change beginning in undergraduate training. The American Nurses Association (ANA, 2023) issued a position statement calling on nurses to “integrate the science of climate and health into nursing education, research, and practice” (p. 1).
Nursing, as the largest health care profession in the U.S. with 4.7 million RNs (American Association of Colleges of Nursing [AACN], 2024), is well positioned to positively affect health systems. According to Gallup polls (Brenan, 2023), nurses are the most trusted profession, allowing for considerable...