84 chapter 3 3.4. GENERAL DISCUSSION The COVID-19 pandemic posed a significant threat to people’s health and well-being and disrupted daily lives, forcing individuals to adapt in a short amount of time. In this paper we aimed to understand whether transilience, reflecting the perceived capacity to persist, adapt flexibly and positively transform in the face of an adversity, is relevant in the context of adaptation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Transilience has been found to make people more likely to engage in adaptive behaviours and to show higher levels of well-being in the context of climate change risks (Lozano Nasi et al., 2023a). We studied whether similar patterns can be found in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, compared to climate change risks, posed a much more acute and immediate threat to people’s lives. Across one cross-sectional study in Italy and one longitudinal study in the Netherlands, we investigated whether people perceive transilience in the face of COVID-19, and whether higher transilience is positively related to adaptive responses and well-being across different countries and time points, despite varying levels of the threat posed by the pandemic and differences in the containment policies that were implemented by the relevant national government. Next, we tested whether transilience is causally related to adaptation behaviours and well-being. Furthermore, we explored whether higher transilience in the face of COVID-19 is associated with higher perceived adaptive capacity and intention to adapt to climate change, due to the confrontation with COVID-19. People Perceive Transilience in the Face of COVID-19 First, we found support for Hypothesis 1: people, on average, perceived transilience across different countries (Italy and The Netherlands) and time points (in The Netherlands), despite differences in the severity and acuteness of the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research has shown that people perceive they can do more than just ‘bounce back’ (i.e., maintain or recover the status quo; Bonanno, 2004) in the face of climate change, and that they see possibilities for positive change as well (Lozano Nasi et al., 2023a). We consistently found that people, on average, perceived they can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of COVID-19 as well. These results suggest that people perceive transilience even when facing an acute, immediate, direct, and clear threat to individual personal health and survival, as experienced during a pandemic. Such a threat is rather different from climate change risks, which, especially in western countries, tend to be associated with more gradual and cumulative risks (IPCC, 2014c; Nath & Behera, 2011; Poortinga et al., 2022). Importantly, our findings indicate that people perceived they can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform across contexts with varying degrees of severity and
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