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. 

Free online courses and resources on climate and health

Starting to learn about today's environmental crises and their relation to human health can be quite overwhelming given the exponentially increasing number of resources that are becoming available. The good news is that it probably doesn't really matter where you...

An evidence-based guide for decarbonizing physiotherapy clinics

Climate change is the largest threat to human health and wellbeing globally (WHO, 2021). The healthcare industry itself currently contributes to fuelling the climate crisis with its emissions and material consumption (Karliner et al., 2020). There has been much...

La lutte aux changements climatiques ne se planifie pas dans une seule langue : implications pour la physiothérapie environnementale

Puede descargar una versión en español de este blogpost aquí: Cleaver, S., Hudon, A. & St-Georges, M. (2021). La lucha contra el cambio climático no se planifica en un solo idioma: implicaciones para la fisioterapia ambiental (Traducido de francés por Charles,...

Is it time to rethink what we mean by ‘therapy’? Prof David Nicholls keynote from the EPT Festival 2023

Given that the word therapy makes up half of our profession’s name, you might think physiotherapists would have developed a thorough understanding of the concept. But this is not the case. In fact, within the physiotherapy literature, there has been almost no...

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