111 collective transilience in the face of climate change 4.4. GENERAL DISCUSSION Protecting one’s own community from the negative impacts of climate change is as important as protecting oneself. In this paper we studied which factors may motivate individuals to engage in community-based adaptation measures (e.g., joining a community initiative to protect the community from climate change risks). These are measures aiming to help protect the community from climate change risks, rather than focusing solely on individual protection (e.g., purchasing insurance). We focused on collective transilience, which captures the extent to which people perceive they, as a community, can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of climate change risks. Our scale to measure collective transilience showed good validity (content, concurrent, discriminant and incremental; see Supplementary Material). Across two studies, we found that on average people perceive they can be transilient as a community, yet they do not strongly (intend to) engage in community-based adaptive actions. As expected, across both studies we found that stronger collective transilience is related to stronger community-based adaptation intentions (Hypothesis 1), such as installing an app that allows to warn neighbours in the case of a climate related hazard and to check on their safety (Study 1 and 2). Unexpectedly, higher collective transilience was not significantly associated with more community-based adaptation behaviours (Study 1). Collective transilience was positively related to community-based adaptation indicators associated with SensHagen, a community initiative for making the Dutch neighbourhood of Stadshagen more climate adaptive. Specifically, higher collective transilience was associated with more positive evaluation of, higher interest to join, and a stronger intention to support SensHagen, as well as higher likelihood to seek information about the initiative (Study 2). Furthermore, higher collective transilience was associated with stronger support for local adaptation policies (Study 1). Interestingly, higher collective transilience was also associated with more individual adaptation intentions (exploratory analysis, Study 1 and 2) and behaviours (Study 1). We found that higher collective transilience was related to higher individual transilience, indicating that people who perceive they can be transilient as an individual are also more likely to perceive they can be transilient as a community. Collective and individual transilience are probably related, as they both capture individuals’ perceptions about the capacity to adapt to climate change risks. Yet, our results indicate that these, not only theoretically, but also empirically reflect different constructs, as individual transilience captures the perceived adaptive capacity of the individual, while collective transilience captures the perceived adaptive capacity of one’s community. Individual and collective transilience are also likely influenced by different factors, which we did 4
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