Canadian Geographer-Geographe Canadien最新文献

The impacts of anthropogenic climate change are rapidly worsening, but current efforts to mitigate this crisis are insufficient. Therefore, it is critically important to understand how to motivate more individuals to take action to protect against future climate change impacts. This study examines the individual-level factors that predict motivations to act, as well as potential barriers to action in a sample of Canadian adults. Participants completed a questionnaire that assessed a) demographics; b) climate change knowledge, opinions, and scepticism; and c) psychological factors that may impede action. The responses were analyzed to determine the factors that explain whether individuals would change their actions in light of climate change and to what extent climate change considerations impact their actions. Predictors of action included how informed individuals were about climate change, perceived severity of its effects, perceived urgency to act, and climate change scepticism. The strongest predictor was perceived powerlessness; individuals who felt a sense of powerlessness were less likely to change their actions and reported that the threat of climate change had less influence over their behaviours. Powerlessness in turn was associated with age and political affiliation. Implications of these findings, and possible solutions to overcome the barrier of perceived powerlessness, are discussed.

In the current study, we explored the prison design and infrastructural changes that Canadian correctional officers consider to be essential in the construction of a new provincial correctional institution intended to replace Her Majesty's Penitentiary (HMP) in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Analyzing 28 semi-structured interviews conducted with correctional officers employed at HMP, we found the poor working conditions within HMP are, at least in part, related to the physical design of the prison, including inadequate lighting, poor air quality and temperature, high sound levels, and other spatial limitations. Building on the prison design literature, findings suggest that while prison design requires attention to physical security at the forefront, there are ways to improve the space, recognizing how an uncomfortable workplace and living conditions also pose a potential threat to the well-being and safety of correctional officers and people who are incarcerated.

This article explores the potential of Okanagan Valley as a place of distinctive wines and the tourism experiences that match these wines. By “distinctive” I mean wines with a sense of place woven into their production and marketing—wines that are called “terroir-driven” in the wine world. My focus is not on wine production, but on place-making and regional planning. The article is informed by geographical and sociological work on wine, but it accentuates the empirical over the conceptual to explore the long-term potential of the Okanagan as a wine destination. Methodologically, the paper synthesizes academic and trade sources with primary fieldwork material, including participant observation in the region and interviews with wine professionals in British Columbia. It contributes to the efforts to forge an authentic narrative for the Okanagan as a place of wine.

Residential building population data can be useful in a breadth of urban planning, health, transportation, and business applications. Unfortunately, complete datasets of residential building populations are not widely available for use in Canada, and therefore either larger census geographies are used or residential building populations must be estimated. This research explores four different methods of estimating residential building populations, including: an equal allocation method, two measures based on building volume, and a novel method that integrates census data at the dissemination area level to calibrate a population estimation model. This work comprises three parts: 1) a description of these approaches, 2) an evaluation of their validity in a case study in Hamilton, Ontario, and 3) an application of these methods in measuring spatial accessibility to schools. Our results show that most methods yield very similar results, and most provide reasonable estimates of building populations that could be useful for some analytical tasks. However, all methods resulted in instances of error, particularly for the largest population buildings. We conclude that while more complex methods do not significantly outperform simpler methods based on building volume alone, the blend of these methods could yield more accurate population predictions.