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 EPA Student Assembly

Students have been a critical part of the Environmental Physiotherapy Association since day one. The unquestionable passion of physiotherapy students wishing to learn how they can contribute to doing something positive for their environment as part of the profession...

Implementing environmental physiotherapy learning outcomes in the new UK MSK Advanced Practice Standards

We have all come across learning outcomes (LOs) that form the backbone of accredited physiotherapy programmes and standards of practice. Physiotherapy academics spend hours developing LOs, a task where you try to find the balance between Oracle-of-Delphi-ambiguity and...

Are humans really at ‘the wheel of the world’*

During the brilliant August EPT Agenda 2023 participating institutions meeting organised by Filip and bringing five invited speakers together to talk about the integration of planetary health, environmental and sustainability perspectives into occupational therapy,...

Is it time to rethink what we mean by ‘therapy’? Prof David Nicholls keynote from the EPT Festival 2023

Given that the word therapy makes up half of our profession’s name, you might think physiotherapists would have developed a thorough understanding of the concept. But this is not the case. In fact, within the physiotherapy literature, there has been almost no...

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