133 general discussion In Chapter 3, we examined the relationship between individual transilience and a wide array of adaptation actions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We expected that higher transilience in the face of COVID-19 promotes various adaptive responses, including individual behaviours aiming to protect oneself and collective behaviours aiming to protect others from the virus. Notably, we expected the relationship between transilience and adaptation actions to uphold despite variations in the seriousness, severity, and acuteness of the threat posed by the pandemic, and despite different policy responses to limit the spread of the virus across different countries and time periods. As expected, the results from The Netherlands showed that higher transilience increases the likelihood that people engage in both individual and collective adaptation behaviours to limit the spread of COVID-19; notably, these relationships were robust across different stages of the pandemic. Additionally, we found preliminary evidence that transilience at a given time may causally influence both individual and collective adaptation behaviours later in time. Yet, in contrast to our expectations, higher transilience did not promote adaptation behaviours in Italy, where the restrictions implemented by the national government severely limited people’s freedom of choice. This suggests that transilience may be less likely to promote adaptation actions when the context severely limits people’s freedom to engage in adaptation behaviours. Collective Transilience Predicts Community-Based and Individual Adaptation Actions We aimed to study whether transilience can promote also community-based adaptation, which implies that people act within and in the interest of their community. Although Chapters 2 and 3 suggested that individual transilience may promote adaptation also at the collective level, we assumed that perceiving transilience at the individual level may not be enough to increase the likelihood that people engage in behaviours to protect their community from climate change risks. Instead, we proposed that particularly collective transilience, which reflects the extent to which an individual perceives that their community (including themselves) can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of climate change risks, is relevant to promote community-based adaptation efforts. In Chapter 4 we showed, first, that people are generally not very likely to engage in community-based adaptation behaviour to protect their community from climate change risks. Still, as expected, higher levels of collective transilience increased the likelihood that people engage in a wide range of community-based adaptation actions, including incremental actions (e.g., buying sandbags together with others to protect the local area from floods), transformative actions (e.g., joining a community initiative to reshape the local neighbourhood, by replacing concrete with trees and bushes, to protect the community against heatwaves and floods), support for local adaptation policies, and even intentions to be engaged in a real-life local community initiative 5
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