Advancing an environmentally responsible physiotherapy

 

The world faces complex and interrelated crises… Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, rapid urbanization, geopolitical conflict and militarization, demographic change, population displacement, poverty, and widespread inequity create risks of future crises even more severe than those experienced today. Responses require investments that integrate planetary, societal, community and individual health and well-being (WHO 2021 Geneva Charter for Wellbeing)

 

 The impact of human activities on our planet’s natural systems has been intensifying rapidly in the past several decades, leading to disruption and transformation of most natural systems. These disruptions in the atmosphere, oceans, and across the terrestrial land surface are not only driving species to extinction, they pose serious threats to human health and wellbeing. Characterising and addressing these threats requires a paradigm shift (Myers, 2017)

Action at the level of direct drivers of nature decline, although necessary, is not sufficient … a sustainable global future’ is ‘only possible with urgent transformative change that tackles the root causes: the interconnected economic, socio-cultural, demographic, political, institutional, and technological indirect drivers behind the direct drivers (Diaz et al., 2019)

About

An international community of academics, clinicians, practitioners and students interested in exploring and advancing the field of environmental physiotherapy. 

Blog

Follow our latest musings on environmental physiotherapy. Ideas, inspiration, news, publications, events, and more. 

Join

Become part of the first international community of physiotherapists with an interest in researching, developing, and practising physiotherapy at a planetary scale. 

Resources

A growing selection of resources carefully selected by members of the EPA to inspire your thinking and practice of environmental physiotherapy. 

COVID-19, healthcare and the environment (the long read)

I remain unsure how to start this blogpost. The only thing that seems fairly clear is that I am trying to make sense of the current COVID-19 pandemic and I suspect that the same is true for many others. Because of my recent preoccupation with the implicit and explicit...

Online environmental physiotherapy workshops at the 9th International week HAN University Nijmegen

This years HAN University of Applied Sciences 9th International Week - Connecting localism to globalism: Critical perspectives on allied health professions - will feature a host of interesting workshops, lectures and seminars. Two of these are highly relevant to...

What actions can I take as a physiotherapist to reduce my professions ecological footprint the most efficiently?

If you are a clinic based, community based or outpatient-based physiotherapist then one of the most important actions you can make is to be an incredible physiotherapist! What I mean by this is that the better job you can do at rehabilitating someone from physical...

New Year, New Possibilities for Environmental Physiotherapy

The beginning of 2025 marks the middle of the sixth year of the revolution that is environmental physiotherapy, with no signs of slowing down for the Environmental Physiotherapy Association.  Next to countless other activities and lots of further collaboration and...

If you have any thoughts, ideas or questions about environmental physiotherapy,
we would love to hear from you anytime

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