Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: climax thinking (Page 1 of 4)

New paper on resistance to flood risk mapping

March 30, 2023 /
Also congratulations to Sam for being named as the 2023 recipient of the Sustainability Impact Award at Dalhousie!

Also congratulations to Sam for being named as the 2023 recipient of the Sustainability Impact Award at Dalhousie!

Samantha Howard’s Honours research was published today in The Canadian Geographer (last edition before it changes to Canadian Geographies to allow for gender neutral in French). Her new open access paper, Flood risk mapping in southwestern Nova Scotia: Perceptions and concerns, explores drivers of resistance to publicly available flood risk mapping in Liverpool and Bridgewater, NS, using the dimensions of climax thinking. In her AdMail-distributed survey, Samantha found that generally public flood risk mapping is supported, at least when we asked about it using positively phrased statements. But 16% of people agreed that having such mapping available publicly was an unacceptable risk for real estate values. One in six is low, but can be impactful if those people wield economic or political power. Exploring what drove that expression of resistance, the usual variables had no effect (flood experience, flood risk assessment, perceptions of change in flood risk). But when climax variables were included, two in particular, it almost quadrupled the predictive power of the model. Which variables? Agreeing that “I am not able to cope with the land changes required to deal with significant increases in flood risk at this point in my life” and “Flood management decisions I make do not have implications for others”. This self-orientation even trumped being a parent. This survey served as a good pilot for her current Masters research, currently being written up (when she’s not busy accepting University awards, that is). Congratulations, Sam!

Meddylfryd yr anterth

November 14, 2022 /

A quick thanks to the PloCC (Places of Climate Change) network at the University of Bangor, Wales, for the invitation to present to their monthly seminar series on Nov 9th. I spoke about climax thinking (the title of this post is its Welsh translation, literally, “the mentality of the peak” according to Google Scholar) using examples from wind energy, coastal adaptation and flood-risk mapping (highlighting work by past and current graduate students Kristina Keilty, Ellen Chappell, Krysta Sutton and Samantha Howard). Thanks to the effort PloCC took to translate my abstract, I’ll share it here for any Welsh speakers who discover this page.

Trosiad yw meddylfryd yr anterth am wrthwynebiad i newid y dirwedd er lles y cyhoedd. Deilliodd o ymchwil seiliedig ar le yn Nghanada Atlantig. Yn yr un modd â damcaniaeth olyniaeth mewn ecoleg, rydym yn aml yn credu bod tirweddau mewn cyflwr delfrydol neu ecwilibriwm (h.y. yr anterth), ac y dylid dychwelyd ato ar ôl pob aflonyddwch megis trychinebau naturiol. Mae angen inni symud at ffordd ddi-ecwilibriwm o feddwl am dirwedd o ystyried yr heriau a wynebwn o ran cynaliadwyedd a’r goblygiadau posibl i’r dirwedd. Dyma gyflwyniad sy’n rhannu gwaith achos ynglŷn â gosod ynni’r gwynt, enciliad yr arfordir a mapio perygl llifogydd i symud o lefel y canlyniad (gwrthiant) i lefel y broses (achosion) y syniad newydd hwn, a’r goblygiadau i ymchwil ac ymarfer.

Topically, a great example of climax thinking came into my morning news media today, in the local rejection of government-funded wind turbines to help Stewart Island, NZ, get off of diesel generators. As the term otherwise hurtles to a close, and I look ahead to the Restoring America’s Estuaries conference in New Orleans the first full week of December, I’m keeping my eye to related media. I look particularly forward to the NYT reporting about this call for experiences of disaster rebuilding. A final note, do yourself a favour and read Rutger Breman’s book Humankind; I listened to the audiobook through the Halifax’s library’s Libby app on a long bus trip and it made me feel much better.

Atlantic Flood Mapping Conference

October 7, 2022 /

Samantha Howard presents her Honours and early Masters results at the Atlantic Flood Mapping Conference in Halifax, Oct 5, 2022

The last week was a busy one. I enjoyed doing a guest talk for the University of Massachussets at Amherst’s ECo Seminar series last Friday. I updated my 2020 keynote for IASNR, including insights from Samantha Howard’s Honours and Masters surveys on flood risk mapping. Thanks to Jesse Caputo and Brett Butler for the invitation to spend more time reflecting on what I’ve been learning about climax thinking over the past few years of empirical exploration.

This week I squeezed the Atlantic Flood Mapping Conference into my week. On Wednesday, Samantha presented her work to a remarkable assemblage of government, NGO, consulting, academic and other experts in the technology and human dimensions of flood risk and hazard mapping. We could hardly have asked for a more appropriate audience. On the Thursday, after my class, I took part in the workshop component of the event. As part of one of those sessions, I presented some of the social science principles that underlie public resistance to flood risk or hazard mapping, to set the stage for breakout groups on best practices in communication. I included in my presentation media analysis work done by former MREM M.J. Valiquette (funded by CBCL) to inform their flood mapping guidelines for Nova Scotia municipalities.  Unfortunately, my session at this event conflicted with the book launch for Power of Landscape in the Netherlands, which I was sorry to miss.

The end of the day on Thursday, I was delighted to have an (uninterrupted) talk with Jeff Douglas, on CBC Mainstreet NS, about managed retreat. They quoted from my last blog post to get things started, but the conversation was fun and wide-ranging. You can have a listen here.

Climax thinking on the coast – new paper in Environmental Management

July 2, 2022 /

The experimental design for our 2019 focus groups, inspired by climax thinking

Happy finally to have the first paper out open access in Environmental Management from the SRES node of the SMU-led NRCan-funded Making Room for Movement project. This paper tells the results of the online (pre-COVID!) focus groups that we ran with coastal property owners back in summer 2019, and specifically, the impact of the experimental ‘priming’ treatments that MES Krysta Sutton and I applied. Framing is a more common idea than priming. In framing you design the message itself to be acceptable to your audience by emphasizing some aspects and de-emphasizing others. Priming is more like setting the stage: getting people thinking in ways that will allow difficult messages–like those about coastal adaptation and retreat–to later land productively. We used three experimental treatments based on the climax thinking framework, and tested the impacts quantitatively (using pre-post tests) and qualitatively (analyzing focus group discussions). Getting people thinking about future generations was most clearly effective, but it was also helpful to get people thinking about altruism in their community (past and present). This suggests some useful ways to engage with residents in areas faced by sea-level rise. Briefly: Don’t look backward, but forward to future generations, and outward to focus on the meaning in tackling shared challenges together.

Renewed resistance to wind energy in NS

April 19, 2022 /

The Amherst wind farm emerges from a blizzard as my train carriage whips past, April 2022.

Interesting to see new resistance emerging to wind energy in NS, using disappointingly familiar language. For instance, in Inverness County last week, to paraphrase, we’re not opposed to wind energy, of course, but this is the wrong place for it. A few weeks ago I submitted a letter to a process that was underway in the Municipality of Cumberland to review their wind turbine regulations, as a result of conflict over the proposed Higgins Mountain wind project. I drew on research by MES students Ellen Chappell and Mehrnoosh Mohammadi in that letter (it is included as Appendix C, p. 46-47,  in Plan Cumberland’s Public Engagement report of their review).  Ellen’s thesis work showed that wind energy support is quite strong in the Amherst area, even among those who can see wind turbines currently. Mehrnoosh’s work on renewable energy in amenity landscapes like vineyards showed that visitors accept that landscapes are for more than just the reason they are visiting. In fact, if vineyards brag about their energy infrastructure, it is possible that visitors will see it as an asset. Resistance threatens the next phase of Nova Scotia’s energy transition, and is characteristic of climax thinking: erroneously believing that our landscapes are in a final and stable state. A few highlights to my letter to Plan Cumberland follow:

I believe it is important to transition to what is often called a ‘multifunctional’ landscape norm, where we allow for a layering of energy into other land uses. In Canada we have not had to do much of this yet thanks to our large area, but others have. In NS we must learn how to as our population grows and electrification proceeds to reduce carbon emissions. Evidence from some national survey work I have collaborated on (also attached) suggests it is good for us to be exposed to the energy sources on which we depend. This strengthens our support for renewable modes, and may in fact inspire decisions to conserve energy, which I’ll talk more about next. The truth is that energy has a footprint—and deserves a footprint—in our lives. Hiding that footprint only makes us less likely to understand our dependency and its costs. …

… When it came to trying to predict people’s willingness to have wind energy in view of their home the two strongest predictors were agreement to the following two statements:
• Seeing wind turbines from my home reminds me that electricity I use has to be generated somewhere.
• Energy is just a commodity; if we can develop it to sell elsewhere (e.g. New England), then we should.
… those who agreed to both statements have made a shift in their thinking: putting energy alongside other regional commodities as viable for export beyond local needs (as they do in more established energy-producing regions and potentially enabling a more resilient regional grid), while taking responsibility for bearing the costs of their own energy consumption too. …

Survey responses speak to the importance of being willing to tackle new challenges and seize new opportunities rather than hide from them by trying to hold landscapes as they are—particularly those designed for needs other than the ones we face today—or otherwise trying to exclude energy from ideas of what our landscape is ‘for’.

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