Climate change and the public health nutrition agenda.

The lead editorial in this issue challenges our discipline to keep consideration of the environment central to public health nutrition research and practice, not only in terms of how the environment impacts on nutrition and health but how humans impact on the environment. Climate change is being described in the lay media as one of the biggest challenges facing humankind. It has numerous obvious and many potential impacts on public health nutrition, including the exacerbation of food insecurity in some regions, loss of habitable and farming land to flood, encroachment of the sea and desertification of farmland. But how has the global debate about climate change and its potential effects been integrated into public health nutrition debate? In this issue, Sulda et al. present a framework to guide action in the public health nutrition workforce to develop policies and practices addressing factors contributing to climate change. Consultative research among key informants and a sample of the public health nutrition workforce in Australia demonstrated that although addressing climate change was considered a valid role and issue for nutritionists, there was little support for programme development to address climate change among the workforce. This suggests that this workforce has a way to go in terms of integrating into practice the rhetoric of climate change mitigation.