Climate Change Moves Into the Core of Health Professional Training

Health professions education has reached a turning point on climate change, according to an editorial published on 23 October 2026 in Frontiers in Public Health. Written by Anusha Govind of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, William Brett Perkison of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston School of Public Health, and Adelita Gonzales Cantu of the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio School of Nursing, the editorial introduces a Research Topic titled Integrating climate change into health education and promotion. The editors state that the field has moved past the stage of debating whether climate change belongs in health curricula at all.

The conversation, they write, is now centered on how best to integrate climate-related knowledge and skills into education and practice. They support that claim with a recent survey of United States medical students in which 83.9 percent said climate change and its health effects should be added to the medical school curriculum, while only 13 percent believed their school offered this education. The gap between demand and delivery described in that survey sits against the health risks that climate change poses.

As the editors outline, climate change exacerbates chronic health conditions, influences the spread of infectious diseases, and even affects food and water availability and security. As these environmental changes and their associated health risks accelerate, the editors describe an urgent need to incorporate climate change education into the health professional curriculum. The Research Topic they assembled aims to equip readers with diverse perspectives on curriculum structures and designs, spanning curriculum innovation, competency development, leadership training, and practice transformation.

The contributions they gathered range from medical student electives to residency curricula, interprofessional courses, and programs reaching well beyond the traditional boundaries of medical education. The collection opens with an overarching narrative review by Maisoon, which examines the numerous ways in which climate change and health education has been incorporated into medical training throughout the last two decades. The themes Maisoon identified in this review, the editors note, can be seen recurring in the other manuscripts of the collection.

That recurrence indicates that the individual contributions, although varied in format and audience, draw on a shared body of approaches that has accumulated over twenty years of effort to bring climate content into medical training. A major theme across the Research Topic covers innovative ways to rapidly introduce climate and health education using various curriculum structures. Baldwin and colleagues describe a small group medical student elective that uses case-based sessions along with expert educators to introduce a wide breadth of introductory material on climate and health to interested medical students.

Similarly, Newman and colleagues developed a didactic curriculum with incorporated case-based learning for pediatricians and medical students. They were able to broaden the audience by presenting it to all medical students during a mandatory Social Influences on Health session, embedding climate content within an established course rather than creating a new requirement. Other contributions push the same idea into different training stages and formats.

Dalapati and colleagues created an interprofessional course for faculty and students using asynchronous virtual modules as well as in-person sessions to teach climate mitigation and adaptation efforts at all levels. Chambers describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a curriculum specific for internal medicine residents across a wide breadth of climate and health topics, extending the material from medical school into graduate medical education. Benzekri and colleagues piloted Medicine for a Changing Planet, an online program using competency-based clinical cases, with an important integration of planetary health and One Health perspectives.

The editors emphasize that these manuscripts highlight the importance of using innovative platforms of pedagogy to target learners at different stages of training, and that they offer multiple pathways for implementation of such a climate curriculum into an existing program, depending on the program's bandwidth and structure. Moving beyond incorporation into traditional health professions educational settings, multiple papers discuss the multidisciplinary aspect of climate as a component of health education. The paper by Kalwaney and Cerceo describes nutrition education as an important, yet underutilized educational component in this arena.

It discusses the importance of nutrition as a therapeutic intervention, the quality and quantity of which will be affected by climate change. Similarly, Jeschonnek and colleagues describe how occupational therapists can incorporate climate-related health understanding into sessions with their clients. Like the challenges noted of incorporating climate change education into a medical school or residency program in some of the papers above, they address challenges of incorporating it into client-facing occupational therapy sessions.

These papers show that climate content is not confined to physicians in training but is being adapted to the professional languages and practice settings of allied health disciplines. The multidisciplinary reach extends into pharmacology and the arts. A paper by Mueller and colleagues retrospectively reviewed how climate is linked to pharmaceuticals and prescribing practices, and the need for more emphasis on the integration of these topics into health professional curriculum.

Even further than just healthcare disciplines, Moula and colleagues connect art-based interventions to climate education communications through creative means including art festivals, theater performances, field trips, and sustainability interventions. These manuscripts, the editors write, give a broad outlook on the non-traditional ways in which climate and health education can be incorporated thoughtfully into other disciplines outside of standard medical didactics. Taken together, they suggest that the boundaries of climate and health education are being drawn more widely than the lecture hall, extending into prescribing behavior, therapeutic practice, and public communication through the arts.

Another focus of the manuscripts in this Research Topic includes assessment and evaluation. Moon and colleagues describe a multi-step assessment protocol for climate and health education in a pediatric residency program. By tying climate content to that established framework, the authors connect a new subject area to the instruments already used for residency evaluation.

A prominent theme alongside assessment is leadership and advocacy. Bjorgaard and Barrera present a peer-led model for climate and health leadership development that emphasizes collective action and community engagement. Their work, the editors note, reminds us that climate-health education must extend beyond knowledge acquisition to include the development of leadership, communication, and advocacy skills necessary to address complex societal challenges.

Taken together, the articles in this Research Topic demonstrate that health professions education has moved beyond debating the need to address climate change and is now focused on how best to integrate climate-related knowledge and skills into education and practice. The contributions highlight practical strategies for designing curricula, implementing innovative teaching approaches, defining and assessing competencies, and fostering leadership in climate and health. Collectively, these examples provide a foundation for advancing climate and health education across institutions, educational settings, and health professions disciplines, while supporting the translation of learning into meaningful clinical, public health, and community practice.

As editors, Govind, Perkison, and Cantu write that they are encouraged by the diversity of approaches represented in the collection and by the growing recognition that climate change is fundamentally a health issue. They hope these contributions will serve as a resource for educators, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers working to prepare the next generation of health professionals to address the health impacts of a changing climate and to advance more sustainable, equitable health systems.

Subject of Research: Integrating climate change into health professions education and promotion

Article Title: Editorial: Integrating climate change into health education and promotion

Article References: Govind, A., Perkison, W. B., & Cantu, A. G. (2026). Editorial: Integrating climate change into health education and promotion. Frontiers in Public Health, 14, Article 2002212. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.2002212

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2026.2002212

Keywords: climate change, health education, medical education, curriculum innovation, competency assessment, planetary health, One Health, public health, leadership, health professions, Frontiers in Public Health, editorial