Planetary Health in Nursing Scholarship: A Bibliometric Mapping of Climate Change, Sustainability, and Health‐System Transformation

ABSTRACT Background Planetary health is an increasingly important transdisciplinary approach in nursing because it links human health and equity to the integrity of Earth's natural systems. Climate change is a major component of planetary health, but it is not synonymous with the broader approach, which also encompasses biodiversity loss, pollution, resource pressures, environmental sustainability, and the transformation of health systems. Although nursing scholarship has increasingly engaged with climate change and sustainability, it remains unclear whether planetary health has emerged as a distinct organizing approach in the field or mainly as an extension of earlier climate and sustainability discourse. Objective This study aimed to map the development, intellectual structure, and thematic organization of planetary health–related nursing scholarship, with attention to how climate change, sustainability, environmental health, justice, education, and health‐system transformation are represented within this emerging field. Methods A bibliometric design was applied to English‐language Scopus records retrieved on March 9, 2026. The Scopus export contained 1469 CSV rows. After removal of 13 malformed or continuation rows, 1456 valid bibliographic records were identified. Exact DOI and normalized‐title duplicate checking removed 12 duplicate or near‐duplicate records. The remaining 1444 records were screened for topical relevance, defined as the presence of both an explicit nursing context and an explicit planetary health, climate, environmental sustainability, or ecological‐health focus. A total of 648 records were excluded as topically irrelevant, leaving a final analytic corpus of 796 records. Data were analyzed using VOSviewer version 1.6.20. Co‐citation analysis was used to identify intellectual domains, while co‐word analysis was used to examine keyword‐based thematic organization. Results The final retained corpus comprised 796 records published from 1996 to 2026, with 9082 Scopus citations at the time of data extraction. Publication output remained limited for several decades but increased sharply from the late 2010s and expanded substantially in the early 2020s. Co‐citation analysis revealed four intellectual domains: professional climate mandate, climate justice, and curricular standards in nursing; sustainability education, climate perceptions, and nursing readiness; planetary health, sustainable healthcare, and global policy frameworks; and global climate‐health evidence with methodological and interpretive links. Co‐word analysis showed that nursing scholarship is strongly organized around education, sustainability integration, climate‐health professional responsibility, student and workforce readiness, and perception‐oriented research. Conclusion Planetary health is emerging in nursing scholarship, but it remains unevenly consolidated. The field is still largely shaped by education, professional mandate, awareness, and readiness discourse, with fewer studies focused on implementation, theory development, health‐system transformation, or measurable planetary‐health outcomes. These findings suggest that nursing has a distinctive role in translating planetary health from a broad transdisciplinary approach into education, practice, advocacy, and sustainable care responsibilities.