Calls for nursing action to address climate change are resounding throughout the nursing community, yet many nurses feel ill-prepared to engage in climate action. As a collective practice discipline, we argue that nursings’ internalized a rigid view of what nursing is and, through self-disciplining practices, actively police our knowledge and practice to conform within a bounded domain that fails to view global issues, such as climate change, as being within the scope of nursing. To build nurses’ climate action capacity, we draw on Deleuze and Guarttari’s (1987) concept of rhizomatic assemblages to make an explicit connection between health and climate change, but also how climate action is a moral imperative in the scope of nursing education and practice. Using examples in the four domains of nursing - education, practice, research, and policy, we present how nurses can engage in coordinated and collaborative efforts both within and outside of ‘traditional’ nursing practice to address the connecting and complicated pathways of a changing climate.

In this article, we aim to expand situational analysis (SA), oriented by complex adaptive systems (CAS), by adding the dimension of directionality over time to positional maps. This addition furthers the analytic utility of SA and can aid researchers in identifying areas for transformative action regarding social justice and health equity issues. Adding directionality over time to positional maps pushes researchers to explore how positions move, evolve, and how they could continue to develop. Analyzing these elements expands the analytic utility of positional maps as researchers abductively analyze explicit connections between theorized antecedents, current conditions, and potential futures within a CAS to understand positional movements. The purpose of this analysis is not as a predictive tool but as a tool in identifying potential actionable areas for interventions while further grounding SA in its Foucauldian and Straussian theoretical roots. We use an ongoing public health project in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania, to demonstrate how a researcher can apply directionality over time to positional maps.