Environmental Education for Nursing Students: Environmental Awareness for Sustainable Healthcare

Dear Colleagues,

The university constitutes a particularly important dynamic agent of change for sustainability, as it trains future professionals who, in exercising their profession, influence their environment directly or indirectly through their knowledge, values, and attitudes. In this area arises the concept of "environmentalization, or curricular sustainability", which involves the introduction of content and environmental and sustainable criteria in the curriculum to provide students with knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that allow them to develop professionally with respect to the environment.

Nurses are in a privileged position to lead and promote the health benefits of living more sustainably and to make the health sector more environmentally responsible. Health professionals are needed who are able to meet the mitigation and adaptation challenges posed by climate change and the potential depletion of fossil fuels and scarce materials. Environmental sustainability means more than just maintaining something or surviving; it means designing and delivering health services that use resources in ways that do not harm future health and well-being.

Moving towards the goal of sustainability requires specific changes in the skills needed to appreciate the interrelationships between environmental, social, economic, and political systems in order to understand and professionally respond to local and global sustainability challenges. Nursing curricula must include, within a broader context, the links between health and the environment. Climate change and dependence on fossil fuels pose serious threats to health care in the future. We have an obligation to prepare our students to be able to deal with health care planning and resource depletion issues. A nurse who is not able to link clinical waste management, resource efficiency, carbon footprint reduction, and health inequalities will not be able to devise solutions for future health care challenges.

In this Special Issue, we will explore and further develop these priorities through research and review articles, as well as the challenges faced by those trying to implement environmental health and sustainability content into nursing curricula and assess student acquisition of skills. Articles are particularly encouraged on experiences of including environmental health in the nursing degree curriculum; methodological and pedagogical approaches to training in environmental health competencies in nursing students; methodological designs for training in low environmental impact nursing care; validation of instruments for the assessment of environmental health competencies in nursing students; and assessment of environmental awareness of nursing students in their clinical practice training.

Dr. Isabel María López-Medina
Dr. Cristina Álvarez-García
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• environmental health
• sustainability
• nursing students
• nursing curricula
• environmental awareness