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. 

Evidence-Based Clinic Design: What It Means for Physiotherapy Practice

The Environmental Physiotherapy Association highlights a recently published article in the Health Environments Research & Design (HERD) Journal that brings fresh evidence to the intersection of physiotherapy and clinical space design. Titled “Evidence-Based Design...

What If They Fixed It? Part 2: Seeds of Tomorrow

A fictional, but not impossible, story based on a future that could be if current science and research-backed solutions to climate change were implemented by those in power. August 2030. The looming threat of a 26 billion euro fine snapped the Irish Government into...

The History of Light Therapy

Historically, light treatment has roots in ancient Egypt, India, and Greece, as “heliotherapy” (natural sunlight) for the treatment of skin diseases. Modern phototherapy (artificial light) has its origins in the latter part of the 19th century, with the observation in...

Revealing the ecological consequences of research and education: Exploring carbon footprint and management strategies

In the recent years as awareness of climate change and environmental degradation has heightened, so too has the scrutiny on human activities and their ecological footprints. Research and education are not exempt from their own environmental impacts. Laboratories hum...

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