How is stress on the natural environment due to climate change and polluting industries impacting human animal relationships? What are the implications for social work, particularly those working directly within the context of the human-animal bond? Those are the questions our editors and authors sought to answer in the special edition of Social Work in Mental Health, “One Health: a framework to cross boundaries of humanities and sciences.” This collection brought together a diverse range of voices and practice perspectives to explore how climate change is shifting the ways humans interact with animals and the environment and the role of ecological justice in our practice. Social work has long acknowledged the ways in which a client’s environment impacts their behavior through the Person-In-Environment perspective (Kondrat, 2013). And within social work, veterinary social work has advanced the professional understanding of interconnectedness through adoption of the OneHealth framework that seeks to understand the interdependence and advance the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems (Kogan, 2023).

However, even within veterinary social work there has been a lack of scholarship and integration of practices that consider ecosystems. With each new climate disaster or act of environmental degradation our clients, communities, and profession face new stressors for both human well-being and challenges in navigating human-animal relationships and interactions. As such, we hope to provide useful and relevant areas of study and discussion to guide our profession in meeting the new challenges and shortcomings caused by climate change. Within the special edition authors explore a range of scholarship and artistic offerings including; relationships between humans and the more-than-human-world, collaboration and companionship within human-animal families navigating climate stress, the intersection of Zoonosis and human-animal oppression, and advancing both academic and public-facing environmental education. Our speakers will seek to provide a functional understanding of ecological justice within the context of social work, offer an overview of the scholarship and artwork included in the special addition, as well as, explore areas for continued learning and dialogue on how veterinary social work can advance ecological justice within our areas of practice.