Climate Change Task Force

Advancing Nursing Knowledge in a Changing Environment

Climate change is increasingly shaping the health conditions and human responses that nurses encounter across care settings worldwide. Climate-related events and environmental shifts contribute to both physical and psychological impacts, including:

• Climate anxiety and mental distress
• Heat-related morbidity and mortality
• Increased infectious disease risk
• Respiratory, cardiovascular, and neurological changes

These evolving realities require nursing to consider how environmental conditions influence human responses, clinical judgment, and the development of nursing knowledge.

The INKA Climate Change Task Force (formerly NANDA® International) focuses on ensuring that climate-related human responses are appropriately reflected in the nursing diagnosis classification and diagnostic criteria within the NANDA 360 classification.

Why Climate Change Matters for Nursing Classifications

Nursing diagnoses represent professional judgments about human responses to health conditions and life processes. As environmental conditions shift globally, nurses are increasingly caring for individuals, families, and communities affected by climate-related hazards, displacement, and chronic stressors.

As early as 2008, nurses called for the “need for diagnostic labels to describe the responses of aggregates and communities to environmental hazards and conditions” (Green & Slide, 2008).

This Task Force considers how environmental changes influence nursing assessment patterns and diagnostic reasoning, helping ensure that nursing diagnosis classification continues to represent emerging health responses accurately and consistently.

Moving forward, the Task Force may consider nursing outcomes, goals, and actions related to climate change that should be considered for relevant diagnoses.

Purpose of the Task Force

The Climate Change Task Force examines how climate and environmental change affect human health responses and works to support assessment-driven, diagnosis-centered nursing knowledge development.

The Task Force’s work includes attention to:

• Climate-related vulnerability and risk
• Community-level and population-level responses
• Implications for diagnostic clarity and criteria
• Nursing visibility in climate-informed health policy and research

Task Force Goals

The Task Force supports INKA’s mission by discussing research and studies from around the world on climate and health, and considering their potential implications for nursing diagnoses and the broader NANDA 360 classifications.

This includes ensuring that nursing knowledge remains responsive to the changing health realities nurses are facing globally.

Selected Scholarship and Research Expertise

Members of the Climate Change Task Force contribute actively to the growing evidence base on climate and health. Recent and forthcoming publications include work on:

• Climate change and the need to update nursing taxonomies
• Cardiovascular and respiratory impacts of environmental shifts
• Climate-sensitive infectious disease trends
• Nursing knowledge development in response to the global climate crisis

Examples of recent scholarship include:

• Is an update of nursing taxonomies required due to climate change impacts? (International Journal of Nursing Knowledge, 2024)
• The Influence of Climate, Atmospheric Pollution, and Natural Disasters on Cardiovascular Diseases and Diabetes Mellitus in Drylands (Public Health Reviews, 2024)
• Groundwater access reduces water insecurity and diarrhea hospitalizations in drought-affected drylands of Brazil (Hydrogeology Journal, 2025)
• From climate change to nursing diagnosis: Nurses’ response to the global climate crisis (International Journal of Nursing Knowledge, in press, 2026)

To see a more comprehensive publication list, please download the Climate Change Task Force Publications PDF.