Many countries are considering the deployment of renewable energy technologies in marine or coastal locations to mitigate climate change. Here, we consider ways that senses of place have implications for the deployment of offshore wind, tide and wave energy projects. We use in-depth interviews with auto-photography to explore multiple senses of places in an island context with the aim of gauging public views about the acceptability of potential deployment of wind, tidal and wave energy technologies. The study captured many instances where senses of place were invoked to construct arguments around the fit (or lack of) between place and technology, with place used flexibly to refer to specific marine or coastal locations, the island itself and its relation to other places. Auto-photography revealed the diversity of ways in which the land and the sea were meaningful to islanders – as a place for social relations, a place for fun and sport, a place for escape and a place for aesthetic beauty. By combining visual and verbal data to reveal multiple senses and scales of place, the study provides a rich foundation for understanding the acceptability of renewable energy projects.

We explore the tensions and dynamic connections between the place narratives of Faroese residents and those of Tourism Faroe Islands. Our findings demonstrate the need to shift from sense to senses of place in order to accommodate the multiple narratives of people–place relations, which are embedded in different standpoints on mobility and place change. Residents and brokers adopt different senses of place in order to respond to social and ecological pressures wrought by mobility, and the potential economic benefits of tourism growth and development. Concurrently, important relations exist among place meanings, one’s understanding of system variability and behavioural responses. Thus, senses of place emerge as a result of dynamic and complex relationships between different types of narratives on place that are constantly unfolding in response to social-ecological change.

Given global social and environmental change, understanding how resulting place change affects people–place bonds is of pressing importance. However, given traditional views of these bonds as static, understanding the fluidity of people’s relationship with place remains nascent. We examine how people’s sense of place relating to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef changed over a four-year period during which the reef suffered climate-change-induced mass coral bleaching. Operationalising sense of place with seven indicators representing place attachment, identity and meanings, we found increases in attachment, identity and two meanings (pride, biodiversity) and decreases in three meanings (lifestyle, aesthetics, scientific value). We suggest that place change heightened the emotional and intangible elements of sense of place, while having a negative effect on the more instrumental meanings. Our results challenge a notion of people–place bonds premised on fixity, stability, and low dimensionality, instead suggesting the need to consider them as dynamic and multidimensional.

The chapter focuses on people’s experiences of natural places and changes in their sense of place through the use of social media. It explores how social media are linked to senses of place and experiences of nature from a social–ecological–technological systems perspective. This is illustrated through four empirical cases representing specific people–place–tech systems, i.e. systems where different social, ecological and tech contexts interact. From a system perspective, those couplings are integrated parts of people’s experiences of nature that bridge virtual and physical worlds, thereby facilitating and communicating cognitive, affective and behavioural social-ecological interactions. These interactions foster novel individual and co-constructed meanings of place and thus plural senses of place; they can also mobilise people around shared meanings of place that are used to question dominant views. Thus, it is argued that social media can mediate and proliferate plural meanings of place, leading to new conceptualisations of senses of place.