75 individual transilience in the face of the covid-19 pandemic Climate Change Adaptive Capacity (due to COVID-19). We asked participants to indicate their level of agreement with the following item: ‘Due to COVID-19, I think I am more resilient in the face of the serious consequences of climate change’.21 We focused on resilience as this term is more easily understood by people than the term ‘transilient’, and resilience is a key component of transilience (i.e., the persistence component). Climate Change Adaptation Intentions (due to COVID-19). We asked participants to indicate their agreement with the following item: ‘Due to COVID-19, I intend to engage in measures to address the negative consequences of climate change’.22 Results and Discussion We used R (version 4.1.2) and Jamovi (The Jamovi Project, 2022; version 2.3) for the analyses. Using the psych package (Revelle, 2022), we examined the mean scores of all measures. Table 3.1 shows that the mean score for transilience were above the midpoint of the scale (Mdiff-4 = 1.12, t(128) = 12.01; d = 1.06; p < .001). This indicates that respondents, on average, perceive that they can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of COVID-19, supporting hypothesis 1. We used the custom function corstars (Bertolt, 2008) to calculate bivariate correlations between all relevant variables (see Table 3.1). As expected, the more strongly participants perceived transilience, the more positive personal changes they experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a large effect size (i.e., above 0.40; Lovakov & Agadullina, 2021). Yet, contrary to our expectations, higher perceived transilience did not increase the likelihood that people engage in individual or collective adaptation behaviours and in cognitive coping, nor that they display higher levels of general well-being. Thus, we found little support for hypothesis 2. Interestingly, the more people perceive transilience in the face of COVID-19, the more they perceive they are resilient in the face of climate change due to having faced COVID-19, with a medium effect size (i.e., above 0.24; see Table 3.1). Yet, higher transilience in the face of COVID-19 did not increase the intention to adapt to the negative consequences of climate change. The weak and non-significant relationships between transilience and adaptive responses (i.e., adaptive behaviours and well-being) may be due to the severity of the restrictions imposed by the Italian government at the time of this study, which seriously limited people’s freedom to act. 21 This scale initially included two additional items, which we excluded from the analyses: ‘I think Italians are more resilient in the face of the serious consequences of climate change’ was excluded as we focus on perceived adaptive capacity at the individual level. Moreover, ‘I am confident that I can adapt to the serious consequences of climate change’ was excluded as it did not correlate strongly with the other item (i.e., r < .30, p < .01). 22 The scale included the item ‘I think Italy should take measures as soon as possible to adapt to the serious consequences of climate change’, which we excluded from the analyses as it does not reflect individual adaptation intentions. 3
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