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. 

Environmental physiotherapy and ENPHE The European Network of Physiotherapy in Higher Education

Exciting news seem a near regularity in environmental physiotherapy now. And why not. With so much that still needs doing, we need them very much. The latest in the series, effective as of today, is a new partnership with ENPHE - The European Network of Physiotherapy...

Environmental physiotherapy meets critical physiotherapy meets Latin America

Toward the end of last year, an incredibly inspiring and creative meeting took place amongst physiotherapists in Latin America.  Though it was the first Latin-American meeting of the Critical Physiotherapy Network (CPN), it was a place and occasion that explored the...

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...

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....

If you have any thoughts, ideas or questions about environmental physiotherapy,
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