From leadership research to district action: The Relevance of Sustainability and the Climate Crisis to the Nursing Profession and Nursing Education: A Literature Review

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: review-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

ABSTRACT Introduction The climate crisis impacts global health and is exacerbated by the healthcare sector's emissions. Nurses, as the largest professional group, are key to promoting climate‐resilient, low‐carbon health systems. Integrating climate change and sustainable development into nursing education is crucial, yet gaps remain in understanding their representation in curricula and practice. This review examines the role of nursing in addressing climate change and sustainable development, focusing on their integration into education and related recommendations. Design A narrative literature review was conducted to synthesize existing recent research on nursing, climate change, and sustainable development. No restrictions were applied to study design; however, studies published before 2017 were excluded. Methods A search was conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, and Google Scholar (January 2023, and updated in August 2024). Relevant studies were screened and duplicates removed. Data extraction followed inductive content analysis, with coding and categorization being undertaken collaboratively. MAXQDA PLUS 2022 was used for analysis, and new findings from the follow‐up search were incorporated into existing categories or new ones were developed. Results The review analyzed 33 articles on nursing's role in addressing climate change. Findings highlight gaps in knowledge, delayed responses, and the need for nurses to take on leadership roles. Education is crucial, yet curricula integration remains limited. Nurses must engage in advocacy, interdisciplinary collaboration, and policy development. Barriers include a lack of faculty awareness and overloaded curricula. A collective call for action urges nurses to embrace sustainability, strengthen research, and lead in achieving climate resilience. Conclusion This review highlights the need to integrate climate change and sustainable development into nursing education and practice. Nurses are vital to public health and to addressing climate change, but education gaps hinder their potential. Future research should focus on improving curricula, exploring Advanced Practice Nursing leadership roles, and addressing healthcare system challenges. Clinical Relevance Integrating Sustainable Development and the Climate Crisis into nursing education and practice is crucial to preparing nurses for the health challenges posed by environmental changes, as well as for ensuring effective patient care, disaster response, and policy advocacy. Their integration is a process and should be viewed as being a consequence of the delayed responses, as identified in this review. This process should specifically address the identified gaps, such as the lack of basic knowledge concerning climate change and sustainable development, as well as learning to take on leadership roles in practice. More specifically, taking a leadership role includes both acting as a knowledge multiplier and increasing the health literacy of the general population. Keywords: climate crisis, education, nursing, profession, sustainable development

Study methods

A narrative literature review was conducted to summarize existing literature about the nursing profession in relation to CC and SD. This review design is recommended to present a comprehensive narrative synthesis of evidence into a user‐friendly format, although the methods used to select articles are less systematic than in other reviews (Noble and Smith 2018). To enhance the transparency, rigor, and reproducibility of the review process, we incorporated several systematic elements that distinguish it from a conventional narrative review. The search strategy was designed to be comprehensive, incorporating multiple databases to ensure broad coverage of the relevant literature. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were consistently applied to screen sources, and a structured content analysis approach was adopted to extract and synthesize findings. However, limitations remain, including the absence of a formal quality appraisal and other features of fully systematic reviews.

Limitations

Due to the complexity of the topic as well as the pragmatic methodology utilized, this review cannot claim to cover the full breadth and depth of the subject. A more systematic approach might have revealed further titles and content. Nevertheless, the present review provides broad insight into the topic. It also highlights aspects that should be utilized for further development regarding the implementation and inclusion of the topics CC and SD, in practice as well as in education and training.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Mara Hendry; Tannys Helfer; Christian Eissler; Christian Burr. The Relevance of Sustainability and the Climate Crisis to the Nursing Profession and Nursing Education: A Literature Review. Journal of Nursing Scholarship (2025-09-07). https://doi.org/10.1111/jnu.70045

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.