As healthcare professionals, we recognise the intrinsic connection between human health and the health of our planet.
That's why we're taking a small step to help address a major health issue: climate change.
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🌍 Climate Change: A Very Significant Health Concern
Climate change is widely considered one of the most significant health challenges of our time. Indeed, annual surveys by the World Economic Forum consistently identify it as the world's biggest health problem.
Just some of the ways climate change negatively impacts people's health include:
Exacerbating chronic conditions
Contributing to air pollution, leading to respiratory and heart diseases, and diminishing quality of life
Spreading infectious diseases (as malaria and dengue-carrying vectors like mosquitoes expand into new regions)
Increasing heat-related illnesses and mortality
Threatening food and water security, resulting in malnutrition and water-borne illnesses
Inducing psychological distress, affecting mental health.
Dr. Margaret Chan, a former Director-General of the World Health Organisation, emphasised:
“The evidence is overwhelming: climate change endangers human health. Solutions exist, and we need to act decisively to change this trajectory.”
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🌱 Our Initiative: Planting Trees Together
In response to this pressing challenge, we are launching an initiative for February and March.
For every patient who attends our clinic during these months, we will plant a tree in their name.
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🍃 Why Plant Trees?
Recent scientific research highlights how incredibly effective planting trees is in combating climate change.
According to Professor Tom Crowther of ETH Zürich:
“This new quantitative evaluation shows forest restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions - it is overwhelmingly the top one.”
Planting trees can improve the health of the Earth - and consequently, our own health - by:
✅ Reducing Greenhouse Gases: Through carbon sequestration.
(To illustrate, a single tree can absorb up to 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, and can sequester one ton of carbon dioxide by the time it's 40 years old).
✅ Improving Air Quality:
Producing oxygen for us to breathe whilst simultaneously filtering pollutants.
✅ Preventing Soil Erosion:
Protecting and enriching essential soils (which positively impacts the food / water we consume).
✅ Supporting Biodiversity:
Creating habitats for numerous species (very much including ones we depend upon).
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🌿 Extending Beyond Health and Environmental Benefits
Our partner organisation, Trees for the Future, focuses on the vital role trees play in agroforestry, aiding impoverished farming families to improve land quality and productivity. This work extends beyond environmental and physical health benefits:
✅ Empowerment:
Providing poor families with food security, income, and education.
✅ Community Development:
Fostering unity and leadership within communities.
✅ Environmental Stewardship:
Encouraging sustainable practices that enhance living standards.
As Trees for the Future notes:
“When we can teach people to value themselves and their environment, they see amazing improvements in their standard of living.”
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📲 If you’d like to book an appointment with one of our Chartered Physiotherapists this February or March, you can do so @ https://goldstandardireland.connect.tm3app.com/book
Alternatively, you can do so by contacting us @:
📞 085 783 6633
or
Thank you very much for your time.
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