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. 

Coming soon: The Environmental Physiotherapy Community Roundtable 2021

It is that time of the year again. Time for the next environmental physiotherapy roundtable, but with a twist. In its third iteration, we are pleased to invite you to the first-ever multilingual Environmental Physiotherapy Community Roundtable! Having grown to over...

What actions can I take as a physiotherapist to reduce my professions ecological footprint the most efficiently?

If you are a clinic based, community based or outpatient-based physiotherapist then one of the most important actions you can make is to be an incredible physiotherapist! What I mean by this is that the better job you can do at rehabilitating someone from physical...

Nature as co-therapist: Physiosail and the connection between disability and environment

The definition of disability and disabled people depends on the model used. The most widely used model in the health system is the "medical model". It assumes disability as an individual mental or physical impairment that is independent of environmental conditions. In...

The personal connection: Reflections on communication in environmental physiotherapy

A few weeks ago the inaugural Environmental Physiotherapy Association (EPA) executive committee met for the first ever online meeting to get to know each other, get an understanding of the status quo of the association 3 months after it's official launch and plan some...

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