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. 

Physiopunk – Speculative fiction for future physiotherapies

Environmental and sustainability education is often conspicuous in its absence from public health and healthcare professional programmes around the world. Yet to respond to the diverse and complex social, ecological and health challenges we are facing everywhere today...

A call to include a perspective of sustainable development in physical therapy research

It is about time physiotherapists realize our potential as a profession that could make vital contributions to sustainable development, in healthcare and in society as a whole. Global environmental changes, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity, greatly...

¿Por qué la fisioterapia medioambiental? ¿Por qué la fisioterapia? ¿Por qué yo? (Parte II)

Decíamos anteriormente ¿Por qué yo? ¿Por qué tú? Tal vez debamos iniciar esta reflexión desprendiéndonos del nombre propio. Pero ya regresaremos a este punto. De momento, resulta más fácil referirnos al ámbito de lo abstracto, al término genérico, a lo que nos toca...

Have we ever treated patients yet? Actor-network theory and the changing patient in a changing world

Have you ever wondered who or what the patient truly is? In medicine, the patient is defined as “a person who is ill or undergoing treatment for a disease.” (Dictionary, 2023) Yet, in my opinion, this definition paints a narrow, one-dimensional portrait of the patient...

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