Hope for a healthier planet and a sustainable future is built on action and solidarity, says Catelyn Richards.

When registered nurse Catelyn Richards began her career in paediatrics, she thought her greatest challenges would be learning how to comfort anxious children and their families.

She recalls a simple technique she used on nightshifts: gently replacing her fingers with an oximeter probe in a toddler’s hand so they could sleep while she took her observations. Over her years on the ward, she estimates she held hundreds of small hands.

When she began her nursing career, Catelyn’s focus was on developing those all-important clinical skills and one-on-one patient care. In more recent years, her attention has turned to a larger-scale health issue that she believes nurses and midwives are uniquely positioned to lead: the response to the environmental crisis the world is facing.

A wake-up call in a heatwave

For Catelyn, the turning point came during the Black Summer of 2019–20, when she left home at 5:45am for an early shift at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital. The air was “thick, hot and sticky… like walking through cream,” says Catelyn, who is now the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF) Climate Change Officer.

Arriving at work, she discovered that the servers hosting the digital medical record system had overheated, plunging the hospital into a digital blackout.

“Everything was on this system – patient and admission history, vital signs, trajectories, med charts, progress notes – all gone,” said Catelyn, speaking at the NSWNMA’s professional day.

While she has had moments in her nursing career “where I have been extremely worried, this was the time that I felt most out of my depth”.

While the outage was eventually fixed, the experience taught Catelyn just how vulnerable health systems are to environmental disruption.

“We were lucky because we were in a well-resourced hospital. That’s not the case everywhere in Australia, and certainly not worldwide.”

The COVID-19 pandemic that arrived soon after this experience cemented for Catelyn the stark reality that nurses and midwives are working in an increasingly uncertain and challenging world.

For Catelyn, climate change is not only an environmental issue – it’s a health emergency.

“Climate change directly impacts health through increases in things like vector-borne diseases like dengue and malaria. Almost the entire population now breathes unhealthy air as a result of burning fossil fuels, which is linked to many diseases, including asthma, lung cancer and strokes.”

Heatwaves trigger heart attacks, exacerbate kidney disease and are linked to cardiorespiratory disease and decreased mental wellbeing, says Catelyn, who is completing a PhD in planetary health and nursing.

Nurses and midwives are the first responders when smoke causes a child’s asthma to worsen, or when an elderly patient collapses in a heatwave, she says.

“In the face of significant contextual difficulties, it’s nurses, carers and midwives who continue to provide life-supporting care, who show up for the communities they serve.”

Practical action

Catelyn admits that, for a long time, she felt that activism was not something she could be involved in: “I’m a nurse. I work with people, not the environment.”

Seeing her young patients – some who had to “come into the hospital to be pumped with airway openers and hooked up to IV lines weekend after weekend due to an acute exacerbation of asthma” – changed her mind.

In 2021, she co-founded Climate Action Nurses, a national network dedicated to empowering nurses to speak up and take practical action.

Today, in her role with the ANMF, Catelyn is helping to place climate change firmly on the union’s agenda. It is now one of the federation’s six strategic priorities, reflecting the profession’s recognition that planetary health is inseparable from human health.

Her work involves building relationships with national groups such as the Climate and Health Alliance, Better Futures Australia, and Renew Australia for All.

“I provide support to ANMF branches, helping to assess what members really want and is needed by way of resourcing for climate change and preparing for climate change,” she says.

She has been involved in launching an ANMF multi-branch initiative to coordinate climate action across states and territories. And she advocates for nurses, midwives and carers in state and national policy forums, ensuring nurses and midwives’ voices shape national climate risk assessments and resilience planning.

What excites her most is hearing about the grassroots projects already happening across Australia, including nurses and midwives leading waste reduction initiatives and advocating for energy- efficient facilities.

“Nurses, midwives and carers are all wanting to take action and are already leading incredible work. It just needs to be scaled.”

Time to end our silence

Hope for a more sustainable future is built on action and solidarity, Catelyn says.

She points to the International Council of Nurses’ recently updated definition of nursing, which now explicitly includes environmental sustainability. The International Confederation of Midwives has also declared climate change a threat to maternal and child health.

On the ground, building hope might involve taking part in local audits of workplace practices, participating in union reference groups, or attending environmental health seminars.

You don’t need to be an expert to begin taking action, Catelyn says. We don’t need “a deep scientific understanding before we’re allowed to act… It’s not always expertise that leads to influencing change. It’s courage, compassion and unrelenting tenacity.”

“We are the largest group of health professionals, comprising over half the total workforce, and our union together is the largest in Australia: 345,000 members strong.”

“Imagine the impact we could have if we all ended our silence and said, ‘This isn’t right’?”