69 individual transilience in the face of the covid-19 pandemic risks, indicating that higher transilience does not reflect denying or downplaying the threat posed by climate change. Importantly, the transilience scale also showed good predictive validity: higher individual transilience increased the likelihood that people engaged in a wide range of adaptation behaviours, ranging from incremental (i.e., aiming to preserve the status quo, for example purchasing insurance) to transformative (i.e., aiming to challenge the status quo and finding new opportunities, for example shifting diets to incorporate crops that are more resistant to the changing climate; see also Wilson et al., 2020), and from individual (i.e. aiming to protect individual and their household) to collective (i.e., aiming to act within and for the interest of the local community, for example joining a community initiative to green the neighbourhood). Transilience was also positively related with general well-being and with experiencing personal positive change because of being confronted with climate change (Lozano Nasi et al., 2023a). Overall, these findings indicate that people perceive they can do more than ‘bounce back’ in the face of climate change, and that higher transilience can encourage concrete adaptation actions and enhance mental health in the context of climate change risks. Yet, the question remains whether people perceive they can be transilient in the face of other adversities, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether higher transilience increases the likelihood of adaptation behaviours and better mental health in the face of such adversities as well. COVID-19 Pandemic: A Different Adversity The risks posed by COVID-19 differ from the risks posed by climate change in several ways. First, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was very sudden and represented an immediate, direct, and clear threat to individual personal health and survival. Instead, the potential consequences of climate change tend to be more gradual and cumulative (Fuentes et al., 2020; IPCC, 2022). The effects of COVID-19 on people’s personal health were visible within a few days or weeks, while the severity of the risks posed by climate change may take longer periods of time to clearly manifest, particularly in western countries (IPCC, 2014a; Nath & Behera; 2011). As such, the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is useful to examine whether people perceive transilience when facing risks that are more immediate and sudden, and whether this in turn makes them more likely to engage in adaptive behaviours to protect themselves and to show better mental health. We expect that people perceived they can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of COVID-19, even if this adversity was much more acute and its threat was much more direct compared to climate change risks. Notably, research 3
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