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. 

Presenting the EPT Agenda 2023 at the Canadian Conference for Global Health

This poster was developed for the Canadian Conference on Global Health: Global Health in a Changing Climate held from 19-22 October 2020. You can read and download the full EPT Agenda 2023 on www.eptagenda2023.com or contact Shaun Cleaver (PT, PhD) and Filip Maric...

World Physiotherapy Congress 2021 – The inofficial environmental physiotherapy stream

Shortly after the launch of the Environmental Physiotherapy Association in the middle of 2019 I put out what felt like a wish to the universe (in blogpost format) hoping for people to submit their interest in environmental and sustainability related topics to be...

The Environmental Physiotherapy Roundtable: A live-streaming event

On Tuesday 26 November 2019 a group of members of the Environmental Physiotherapy Association (EPA) will be coming together in an online roundtable to talk about what environmental physiotherapy is, could, and should be going forward. The event will be live-streamed...

Putting nature-based health and therapy into practice – An international online symposium

One year after the first-ever Environmental Physiotherapy Festival, we arranged an international online symposium on 'Putting nature-based health and therapy into practice'. This symposium featured four 90-minute sessions with presentations by a wide variety of...

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