Environmental Health and Adaptation Strategy to Climate Change

The United Nation's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an urgent call to all countries for action to combat climate change and its impacts (United Nations, 2015). In response, Taiwan's highest national body, the Executive Yuan, has designated health as one of eight primary areas of threats and challenges in the policy document "Adaptation Strategy to Climate Change in Taiwan". Further, the Ministry of Education has been promoting climate-change adaptation education since 2012 and, in 2016, the Teaching Alliance was established to promote the integration of climate change issues into public education curricula as well as resource sharing and multidisciplinary collaboration (Ministry of Education, 2019). The focus of nursing on primary healthcare and community care makes nursing professionals critical to successfully attaining UN SDGs (Shmian, 2016). In addition, the environmental health component of nursing education addresses core global health and public health competences directly (Clark, Raffray, Hendricks, & Gagnon, 2016). The American Nurses Association (2013) includes environmental health as one of the eleven standards of professional performance for public health nursing. This column invites Teaching Alliance educators to share their experiences in multidisciplinary professional, teaching, and practice environments in articles that hopefully enhance readers' knowledge of adaptation strategies and of the sustainable development of public health under climate change.