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. 

Seeing as caring part three: Reconcile

Reconciliation in my art didn’t arrive as a grand revelation. It came as a slow, uncomfortable noticing that I was being pulled in opposite directions and still choosing to stand in the middle. On one side is my clinical life: evidence hierarchies, risk–benefit...

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...

Refocusing Disablement Models about Context: Physiotherapy and the Ecological-Enactive Model of Disability

A complete, humanized description of disability requires consideration of context (e.g., physical environment, social interactions, background life), and the factors contributing to function and disability should be sought at the interface of an individual and their...

Environmental physiotherapy at the bottom of the Arctic Sea

A little over one year ago, one of our first-year physiotherapy students at UiT The Arctic University of Norway wrote a fictional account of a future in which multidisciplinary teams of natural scientists, physiotherapists and many others were tasked to sail to the...

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