Overview
The increasing intensity, frequency, and occurrence of disasters combined with climate-affected health problems places remarkable pressure on our health system. Paradoxically, the health sector contributes significantly to emissions while caring for the community climate change impacts most.
The White Paper presents a four-step climate stewardship approach for nurses responding to climate emergencies:
- We must rethink health service provision.
- Nurses must be enabled to lead emissions reduction strategies within health care.
- Climate stewardship must be developed in the nursing workforce through climate education and research.
- To understand the environmental impact of clinical care, precise data collection, monitoring, and reporting of the health sector’s carbon footprint are imperative.
Key recommendations
ACN recommends:
ACN calls on state, territory, and federal governments to:
- Through the Health, Sustainability, and Climate Unit, implement the National Health and Climate Strategy to promote climate adaptation and engineer climate-resilient healthcare systems.
- Develop a minimum nursing dataset to identify and optimise the geographically diverse nursing workforce to enable a nurse-led, value-based, national healthcare emissions reduction strategy with achievable targets and outcomes administered by a national body.
- Ensure nurses are proportionately represented in the Health, Sustainability, and Climate Unit.
- Provide funding for specialty post-graduate qualifications in climate health, emissions reduction, carbon health literacy, and sustainability to support nurses transitioning into specialty leadership roles.
- Provide funding for a dedicated research grant scheme to expand nurse-led, inter-professional, and cross-sector climate research targeting planetary health, climate change, emissions reduction, and sustainability for clinicians in health care.
ACN calls on nursing education providers to:
- Embed planetary health, climate change, emissions reduction, and sustainability in all undergraduate nursing degrees in Australia to ensure every nurse has access to education and training to respond to climate health, act as climate stewards, and build community resilience.
