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. 

Living well with pain, by the sea

Living with persistent pain can be difficult!  Pain permeates every part of my life and is my constant companion.  In this blog I hope to show how the beauty of the natural world can help support those of us living with persistent pain, and in particular how living by...

A physiotherapy clinic on Vancouver Island blazes a trail in eco-friendly clinic design: Dockside Physiotherapy

After launching the EPA a few months ago, it quickly became clear that one of the topics that had huge interest behind them was about what physiotherapy clinicians, clinic owners and teams could do to be more environmentally responsible in their day-to-day clinical...

Enhancing the environmental sustainability of AHP Services for a Net Zero NHS

In January 2020 Sir Simon Stevens the chief executive of NHS England and Improvement detailed a commitment to a Greener National Health Service (NHS). The NHS is the largest employer in Britain and is responsible for approximately 4% of the carbon emissions of the...

A physiotherapist by profession, an environmentalist by passion

I was born and raised in Malta, a small island found in the middle of the Mediterranean that is hit with extreme currents from the North (coming from Greece and Italy) and South (from Libya and Tunis). Experiencing an island life, I always felt very close to the sea,...

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