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. 

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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. 

It’s raining needles – How can physiotherapists who practice acupuncture foster a healthier environment?

The plastic crisis has concerned us for decades as both landfilled and incinerated waste continue to pollute the environment and pose health risks to humans and wildlife. With packaging of all sorts being the main source of plastic pollution that is clogging the...

Earth Hour 2020 – Raise your voice for nature

Having started in march 2007 in Sydney, Australia, Earth Hour has become one of the world's largest grassroots movements for the environment. And though we find ourselves in a peculiar moment in human history amidst the COVID-19 crisis, which puts a particular spin on...

Reconnecting with nature helped me reconnect with myself and the world

During the worst years of my pain I became withdrawn and isolated, disconnected from the people, places, and experiences that mattered to me. My sole focus was pain and being rid of it so I could get on with my life and get back to being me. Back then, sitting was my...

You are already practicing environmental physiotherapy: whenever you recommend physical activity (and here is how)

Recommending physical activity is all the rage in physiotherapy at the moment, and for good reasons. Yet what we haven't thought about very much so far, is that recommending physical activity is always already an environmental practice. That is, it always has a...

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