113 collective transilience in the face of climate change strongly people perceive they can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform as a community, the more they intend to engage in a wide range of communitybased adaptation actions. Notably, we tested our hypotheses across two different countries (the United States and The Netherlands) where communities likely face different climate-related risks. As such, it seems that collective transilience can predict different types of community-based adaptation actions, in the face of different climate risks, across different contexts, and thus can be a relevant ‘general antecedent’ of community-based adaptation. Our research suggests that perceiving collective transilience is more relevant than perceiving individual transilience when predicting community-based adaptation. While both individual and collective transilience can predict community-based adaptation responses, our study showed that collective transilience is the most relevant predictor of community-based adaptation indicators when individual transilience is also considered. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to formally compare perceptions of adaptive capacity at the community and individual level in motivating community-based adaptation to climate change, making a valuable contribution to the literature on community-based climate change adaptation. Notably, it seems that collective transilience is the most relevant in predicting climate change adaptation also at the individual level, a rather unexpected finding, which does not align with the compatibility principle (Ajzen, 2020). One explanation for this finding could be that some adaptive actions that are taken at the individual level also benefit the collective. For example, greening one’s own backyard can contribute to protecting the entire neighbourhood from flooding. Similarly, people may engage in actions to protect the community (e.g. supporting better infrastructure in the neighbourhood) for personal benefits. In general, different adaptation responses may have benefits for both the individual and community. Another explanation for the relevance of collective transilience also for individual adaptation could be that people may believe the threat of climate change can only be addressed by individual efforts to a limited extent (cf. Fritsche et al., 2018; cf. van Zomeren et al., 2010). Given that climate change affects entire communities rather than individuals in isolation (e.g., damaged public infrastructure, food shortages, compromised mobility, disrupted communication or broken energy supplies; IPCC, 2022), protection is likely more effective when other community members engage in adaptive measures as well (e.g., everyone greens their backyard) and when all work together to protect the community. Climate change is a threat that potentially affects ‘us’ as a collective. Thus, perceiving that ‘we’ can be transilient as a collective may 4
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