Leveraging Social Media to Understand Younger People’s Perceptions and Use of Hydroelectric Energy Landscapes

Large industrial projects change communities, landscapes, and ecosystems, with significant impacts for local people. But, conventional project evaluations often underestimate wide-ranging local interests, especially those of young people. To address this gap, we collected data from Instagram, where a younger demographic dominates the medium, focusing on two hydroelectricity proposals in Canada: the in-progress Site C Dam in British Columbia, and the 1960s Mactaquac Dam in New Brunswick. A year of landscape photos and captions from each were coded into thematic categories and linked based on statistical co-occurrence. Project impacts for this youth cohort can be predicted by identifying the values and activities statistically associated with the features likely to be affected by each proposal: dam construction will affect perceived esthetics and sense of home in Site C, and dam removal will cause lifestyle changes in Mactaquac. The advantages and drawbacks of this method are discussed including implications of such new data sources for social impact assessment.