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. 

Challenging assumptions: thinking and practising beyond the biopsychosocial model of health

If you are a healthcare professional like me, I am sure you have heard about the biopsychosocial model of health. This model was proposed by George Engel in 1977 to challenge the prevailing biomedical approach in psychiatry, as well as medicine, more broadly (Engel,...

World Physiotherapy policy statement on climate change and health: Time to give your feedback now!

In the most exciting news for the rapidly growing world of environmental physiotherapy, World Physiotherapy, the sole international voice for physiotherapy representing more than 685,000 physiotherapists through 125 member organisations from around the world, has...

COVID-19 and physiotherapy through the lens of climate change adaptation and mitigation

After writing my recent blogpost on COVID-19, healthcare and the environment I've continued updating it for a pretty substantial reading, viewing and listening list. Together, I believe that these resources paint a pretty broad picture of what we are going through at...

Launching the Environmental Physiotherapy Association (EPA)

Physiotherapy has needed an international association dedicated to the environment for some time, and not only because we now have social media that allows us to connect across the globe, but because life on our planet is imperilled. The climate crisis now facing us...

If you have any thoughts, ideas or questions about environmental physiotherapy,
we would love to hear from you anytime

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