The beginning of 2025 marks the middle of the sixth year of the revolution that is environmental physiotherapy, with no signs of slowing down for the Environmental Physiotherapy Association. 

Next to countless other activities and lots of further collaboration and support gathered for our various initiatives, we finished 2024 strong with our fantastic ‘Putting nature-based health and therapy into practice’ international online symposium that you can still view online here:

Filip Maric (PhD)

Filip Maric (PhD)

A/Prof, EPA Founder & Executive Chair

Filip Maric is Associate professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and founder of the Environmental Physiotherapy Association. He is interested in the outer rims of healthcare and critical physiotherapy, philosophy, #EnviroPT, environmental post/humanities, planetary health and sea kayaking.

This year will be as inspiring as ever as we continue to advance environmental physiotherapy research, education and practice all around the world. Already in January, we have two further webinars that you can attend, with the first one organised by the Canadian Physiotherapy Association’s Global Health Division… 

And the next one, only a day later, organised by the new iApS2030 Innovation Unit in Sustainable Development, Health, and Global Justice through Service-learning based at the University of the Balearic Islands: 

The latter event will also mark the first quarterly meeting of the EPT Agenda 2027 this year, which, fantastically, continues to grow and grow and grow. We now have over 100 physiotherapy education institutions participating in the EPT Agenda and working to implement environmental physiotherapy education in their curricula and nearly 40 supporting organisations helping us along, including the notable recent addition of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy from the UK.

The webinar hosted by iApS2030 and us will also highlight some of the publications from the first-ever special issue focussing on environmental physiotherapy and service-learning published with Frontiers in Public Health. While we are still in the process of reviewing and editing some of the final manuscripts, the research topic already features as many as seven original publications that will provide readers with inspiring reading and learning.

For those keen to take a more regular deep-dive into research, EPA executive committee member Jessica Stanhope (PhD) will also be hosting a regular journal club, with more information about this coming in our next blogpost.    

Beyond facilitating learning opportunities, however, the EPA and the development of environmental physiotherapy critically hinges on all of our participation and contributions, and there will be ample opportunity to contribute whenever you find the time, expertise, or passion to do so.

In particular, we are hoping to find contributors who are keen to develop our new practice pages as places where people can find hands-on guidance on how to put EPT into practice and show all of the exciting novel approaches to practice that EPT will engender.

The latest addition to pages that anyone can contribute to are our new regions pages. Here, we invite everyone to develop (linguistic or geographic) regional EPA networks, satellites, or affiliates, showcase their work, build community, and share regional information while connecting to a broader international network of enthusiastic colleagues. If you reside on one of these planets, send us a message, share your ideas with us and let us work out how we can help you grow them.

If this wasn’t enough already, we can assure you that much more will happen as the year progresses, so make sure to follow and keep in touch.

And if you ever have any other questions, ideas, concerns, or thoughts that you would like to share with us, don’t ever be shy to reach out. We love hearing from you!

#EnviroPT 🌍🌏🌎🚑

Filip and the EPA executive committee

Header image by Rob Wicks on Unsplash