What is environmental physiotherapy and why is it important? 

Environmental physiotherapy is a new way to think about physiotherapy to benefit the health of people and the planet alike. 

Given the current state of the world, we must recognise that health can no longer be addressed in an isolated and highly specialised manner, but in a way that recognises the inseparable interconnections between health, environment and society. 

Environmental physiotherapy gives us this opportunity and can help us evolve and transform our profession to meet today’s complex challenges in a far more efficient way than we have done before. 

What does sustainability in physiotherapy mean and what is our role? 

Environmental physiotherapist Filip Maric will present a keynote at APASC2025.

At a baseline, it is essential to recognise that sustainability is not a static state that can ever be achieved once and for all. 

Rather, it is a concept that suggests we must make a continuous and deliberate effort to balance our human needs and wants in a just and equitable manner, within the ecological boundaries set by our planetary environment. 

Physiotherapy’s role in this is to take responsibility and invest in this effort, reforming where our own profession has contributed to the current state of the world, but also engaging in transformative change well beyond the confines of our own profession. 

To care for the health of people today demands this extensive engagement. 

What is the current research telling us? 

Research in environmental physiotherapy is still in its early stages but has been growing rapidly over the last few years. 

What, I believe, we are seeing is that environmental physiotherapy really has the potential that we thought it would have. 

We are seeing how the environment (and society) is indeed related to all and every aspect of physiotherapy, and this, in turn, confirms that we must rethink all that we have done so far from this perspective, and draw practical consequences. 

This includes elevating practices we have done well, but also learning to invent and engage in entirely novel forms of physiotherapy that we have previously not considered. 

What do you hope that the audience will take away from your keynote presentation? 

My hope is that the keynote audience will leave feeling that environmental physiotherapy is not something foreign or an optional special interest to our profession, but rather an integral part of it, regardless of our current speciality. 

This realisation can also serve as an inspiration to further evolve our respective current specialities in a manner that is equally as urgent as it is exciting. 

Beyond our specialities, it can help us see our profession and its potential in an entirely new light that is much broader and expansive than the narrow confines that we have put around it so far. 

>>Dr Filip Maric is an Associate Professor at UiT the Arctic University of Norway and founder and executive chair of the Environmental Physiotherapy Association. This association is the first international network of over 1500 physiotherapy clinicians, students, academic and professional representatives seeking to advance environmental awareness and responsibility across physiotherapy research, practice and education. 

>>Filip will be presenting a half-day pre-conference workshop for the Occupational Health national group titled ‘Sustainability in our own backyard’ on Wednesday 22 October at 8:30 am, and a keynote session entitled ‘Environmental physiotherapy—recent developments and future perspectives for the transformation of health’ on Saturday 25 October at 2:30 pm. 

Click here for more information about APASC2025