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. 

The Role of Physiotherapists in Wilderness Medicine

As the profession of physical therapy advances, clinicians are looking for creative ways to apply their skill sets. In recent years, wilderness medicine has been growing in popularity within the physical therapy realm. Wilderness medicine is characterized by remote...

Breaking up the boundaries of our profession and creating something meaningful – Living the Oneness of One Health

Things are packed, and the passport is ready. Now it's just a matter of getting on the train and embarking on an adventure. Quite unexpectedly, as a Master's Student in Physiotherapy, I was accepted for the One Health Summer School in Edinburgh, organized by Una...

Potential Benefits and Challenges of Art–Science Integration in Planetary Health and Environmental Physiotherapy

Artists and scientists both observe and interpret the world, but they do so through different epistemologies. While these disciplines are distinct, encounters between them can generate new forms of understanding (Zhu & Goyal, 2018). Edwards (2009), a Harvard...

Erasure and forgetting: re-engaging the human in environmental well-being

As physiotherapists, we recognize that one of our primary concerns lies in the support of well-being, a concept that is typically viewed through an anthropocentric lens. As underscored by Ton Gevers in his EPA blog post on Actor-network theory, anthropocentrism places...

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