A Tinderbox of Overlapping Stressors: examining southern Vancouver Island residents' emotions and behavioural responses to climate change and community planning

This SSHRC Insight-funded research project puts emotions – fear, pride, grief, disgust, love (of a landscape)– at the centre of land-use decisions and makes them empirically measurable and actionable.

Climate action often stalls not for lack of science, but because decision-makers overlook a powerful driver: emotion. In this research, we put emotions-fear, pride, grief, disgust, love (of a landscape)-at the centre of land-use decisions and make them empirically measurable and actionable. We ask whether and how emotions shape acceptance or rejection of land-use proposals and climate measures across rural, peri-urban, suburban, and urban contexts. Southern Vancouver Island (sVI) faces overlapping pressures-rapid population growth, housing scarcity, habitat loss, wildfires and heat-domes, flooding, sea-level rise, and seismic activity-all concentrated along fragile "edge" geographies (urban-sea, urban-forest, urban-rural). In this pressure cooker, every policy choice creates visible winners and losers, oftentimes amplifying distrust and social conflict; these patterns are increasingly common in other regions too. By understanding implicit emotions AND explicit sentiments, researchers and planners will be better able to anticipate where climate-adaptation proposals will encounter deep-seated resistance, design strategies that align with place-based values, and foster genuine, emotionally informed public participation.

Led by Sarah Wolfe (Royal Roads), Chris Ling (Royal Roads), Evan Andrews (Memorial University), and Michael Drescher (University of Waterloo) are co-applicants on the grant, and Philip Steenkamp (Royal Roads) serves as a collaborator.