68 chapter 3 Transilience: Beyond ‘Bouncing Back’ in the Face of Adversity Transilience acknowledges that adapting to an adversity, such as climate change or a pandemic, may also imply changing for the better, thus doing more than merely ‘bouncing back’ by minimising harm (i.e., resilience; Bonanno et al., 2004; cf. Davoudi et al., 2013; Smith et al., 2010). Transilience is an overarching construct that comprises three key components: persistence, adaptability, and transformability (Lozano Nasi et al., 2023a). Persistence reflects the extent to which people perceive they can persist and have the resources to cope and carry on in the face of an adversity, which is important to (at least) maintain and recover the status quo (i.e., to ‘bounce back’; Bonanno, 2004; Smith et al., 2010). Adaptability reflects whether people perceive they can adapt flexibly and have a broad range of options to adapt to an adversity, which allows people to revise and switch strategies when needed. Such a flexible approach is important for long-term adaptation to an adversity, which may likely require a variety of responses (Barnes et al., 2020; Cinner et al., 2018; Linquiti & Vonortas, 2012). Transformability captures whether people perceive that they can positively transform by adapting to an adversity, for instance by learning something good. We propose that a stronger perception of one’s capacity to carry on, to find multiple ways to adapt, and to change for the better by adapting, may increase the likelihood that people engage in concrete adaptation actions and show good mental health in the face of an adversity. Indeed, historical analyses have shown that humans were able to not only persist and adapt flexibly, but also to thrive in the face of climate change in the past (see Degroot et al., 2021). There is also evidence that past pandemics, like the Black Death, have led to improvements both in prevention methods (e.g., the introduction of quarantine) and in medicine (Benedictow, 2004). Yet, the potential positive side of adapting to adversities, like contemporary climate change (IPCC, 2023) or the COVID-19 pandemic, has hardly been studied. Based on this theorising, a climate change transilience scale was developed and tested to examine the relevance of transilience in the context of climate change. The results suggest that transilience is a relevant and valid construct for understanding adaptation in the face of climate change risks (Lozano Nasi et al., 2023a). Specifically, a series of studies indicated that transilience can be reliably assessed, and that people perceive they can be transilient in the face of climate change risks. The transilience scale further showed good psychometric properties in terms of concurrent and discriminant validity: transilience can be distinguished theoretically and empirically from related constructs for understanding adaptation, like self-efficacy, outcome efficacy, and resilience. Moreover, transilience was not negatively associated with perceived climate change
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw