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. 

Challenging assumptions: thinking and practising beyond the biopsychosocial model of health

If you are a healthcare professional like me, I am sure you have heard about the biopsychosocial model of health. This model was proposed by George Engel in 1977 to challenge the prevailing biomedical approach in psychiatry, as well as medicine, more broadly (Engel,...

Launching the environmental physiotherapy education inspiration-base

As I am writing this, the lands and people of this world are being ravaged by yet another war, adding, what feels like, crisis upon crisis upon crisis. The crisis in Syria is still ongoing. Last year, the IPCC issued its starkest warning about global warming yet....

Earth Hour 2020 – Raise your voice for nature

Having started in march 2007 in Sydney, Australia, Earth Hour has become one of the world's largest grassroots movements for the environment. And though we find ourselves in a peculiar moment in human history amidst the COVID-19 crisis, which puts a particular spin on...

Are humans really at ‘the wheel of the world’*

During the brilliant August EPT Agenda 2023 participating institutions meeting organised by Filip and bringing five invited speakers together to talk about the integration of planetary health, environmental and sustainability perspectives into occupational therapy,...

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