Centring Biodiversity in Nursing for Decolonial Planetary Health

Escalating biodiversity loss is tied to a global colonial-capitalist order that treats human and other-than-human lives as resources for extraction. Sustained by logics of separation and hierarchies of value, this order creates grave risks for planetary health. Nursing is a profession and discipline grounded in relational caring praxis and a growing commitment to decolonizing perspectives. This positions nurses to resist these logics and instead act in recognition of the critical importance of biodiversity and the interconnectedness of human and other-than-human communities. In this discussion paper, we synthesize decolonial and ecological scholarship alongside nursing praxis. We engage five movements (Indigenous Consensus, Natural Law, Rights of Nature, Kincentric Ecology and Queer Ecology) that hold an ethics of kinship and resistance to colonial-capitalist logics. We argue that centring biodiversity, especially in light of the current global biodiversity crisis, offers a pathway to decolonial planetary health. Drawing on this synthesis, we outline implications for nursing research, education, advocacy and policy, and practice, reorienting nursing's ethical commitments toward multispecies care and justice. This is the first nursing-centred synthesis to integrate biodiversity care with decolonial ethics.