97 collective transilience in the face of climate change 4.1. INTRODUCTION Climate change poses various risks for communities in specific ways. For instance, in the United States, inhabitants of a coastal area in the North-East face increased rainfall and sea-level rise, while those living in the South-West face risks of droughts and wildfires (Clayton et al., 2016). There is an increasing interest in understanding climate change adaptation at the community level (McNamara & Buggy, 2017; Schlingmann et al., 2021). Studies have provided insights on the vulnerabilities, adaptive capacities, and adaptation strategies of specific communities (e.g., Ahmed, 2021; Cinner et al., 2018; Galappaththi et al., 2020; Mees et al., 2019; Nguyen & James, 2013; Truelove et al., 2015; Ziervogel et al., 2022), as well as on community resilience in the face of climate change (Carmen et al., 2022; Fazey et al., 2018; Ensor, 2016; Faulkner et al., 2018; Ntontis et al., 2018). Yet, little is known about what encourages people to engage in concrete actions to protect their community from climate change risks. Community-based adaptation behaviours reflect actions within and in the interest of one’s community, such as helping others prepare for natural hazards, joining initiatives to purchase sandbags or replacing concrete and tiles with greenery (i.e., trees and bushes) for flood protection, sharing knowledge, developing measures to protect one’s community from climate-related hazards, and supporting local climate adaptation policies. Research on how to motivate climate change adaptation behaviours has mainly focused on individual behaviours that people can take to protect themselves and their household from climate change risks (van Valkengoed & Steg, 2019a, 2019b). We aim to extend this research by studying a) to what extent people (intend to) engage in community-based adaptation behaviours; b) which factors predict community-based adaptation behaviours, and whether these differ from what has been found to promote individual adaptation behaviours. Specifically, we studied to what extent collective transilience, reflecting the extent to which people perceive they, as a community, can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of climate change risks, can predict community-based adaptation responses. We elaborate on our reasoning below. Individual Transilience and Adaptation to Climate Change Transilience was proposed as a novel way to assess individuals’ perceived adaptive capacity in the face of climate change (Lozano Nasi et al., 2023). It acknowledges that humans may be able to change for the better by adapting to climate change, and thus do more than ‘bounce back’ by maintaining or recovering what they had (as captured by psychological resilience; Bonanno et al., 2004; Smith et al., 2010). Transilience 4
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