In this edition of DRRN Highlights, we’re excited to feature Kathryn McConnell, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UBC and a valued member of the DRRN community. Kathryn investigates how climate-driven hazards impact the built environment, population mobility, and housing access—with a particular focus on wildfires and migration dynamics. Her work spans everything from modelling movement patterns after wildfire events to examining how neighbourhoods and housing markets shift in hazard-affected regions. At UBC she brings an interdisciplinary lens, bridging sociology, climate science, and disaster-resilience studies to support evidence-based decision-making for communities facing climate risks in British Columbia and beyond.
Kathryn McConnell
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
1. Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your current research?
I am an environmental sociologist with research focused primarily on (1) the relationship between climate change and mobility, and (2) changes in the built environment as a result of and in response to climate-related hazards. Much of my recent work has focused on wildfires, and includes projects on wildfire-related displacement, neighborhood change after fires, and powerline de-energizations as an adaptive strategy to wildfire risk. A new project that I am excited to be starting up will use remote sensing imagery to compare housing recovery trajectories across wildfires here in Canada and in the United States.
2. What motivated you to become a part of the DRRN community?
I just arrived at UBC during the summer of 2024, and the DRRN community seemed like a great way to connect with other scholars from across campus who are studying disasters and climate change-related issues. It has also been a great way to learn more about issues here in Vancouver and BC, which are new to me.
3. What do you wish practitioners or policymakers would ask you about your research? What insights would you like to share with them?
Much of my work is focused on the issue of "climate migration," which has become a common topic in public conversations about climate change. I often see media narratives of inevitable mass migration in response to environmental changes, but this is not what empirical research tells us is necessarily happening on the ground. Environmental migration is very context-dependent, and researchers often document non-migration or even reduced migration in response to climate hazards.
4. What future developments in disaster resilience research are you most interested in or concerned about?
I am especially interested in future research that explores how our built environments are socially stratified, which in turn results in uneven hazard impacts. For example, I've been thinking a lot about how different types of housing stock (e.g. owner- vs. renter-occupied, buildings with different economic value) have different physical characteristics, which in turn shape their susceptibility to hazard damage. This line of research brings together sociological thinking about social difference with more biophysical scholarship on building design that I am very interested to pursue.