School of Geography - Theses
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ItemFeeling climate change in Barwon South West: Emotions, place and adaptation governance( 2022)Climate change is experienced in the everyday through relationships with humans, non-humans, and the places that hold them. Despite this, the practice of climate adaptation tends to be understood through the technocratic disembodied lens of global climate science. Climate adaptation professionals working at the local-scale engage with both ways of knowing. This thesis analyses the climate emotions of 10 climate adaptation professionals working in Barwon South West, a region of Victoria, Australia. This region is vulnerable to many climate-change impacts including bushfires, sea-level-rise and heatwaves. Through walking interviews in valued places, associative mapping, narrative-thematic analysis, and poetic methods, I drew out the powerful emotional forces shaping and shaped by these adaptation professionals’ relationships with place, people, climate imaginaries and work. Climate change impacted participants relationships with place, infusing them with a sense of grief, but participants also engaged with place to find solace and relief. Climate emotions were triggered by past, present and future climate imaginaries; dystopian future imaginaries produced anxiety, while local-scale imaginaries were associated with hope and agency. These emotions were consciously and unconsciously managed by participants. Overall, emotions about climate were fundamental features of participants’ lives in and outside the workplace. This thesis illustrates the emotional, peopled practice of adaptation governance, highlights the power of emotions to responses to climate change and reveals how participants find agency and wellbeing in the face of climate change.