The relationship between Collective Transilience and Community-based Adaptation

DOI
  1. Background: The negative impacts of climate change are increasingly visible. People can take different actions that may help to protect their communities from climate change risks, such as joining a community initiative that aims to protect their neighbourhood from the negative impacts of floods and heatwaves, or voice their support for local policies that reduce vulnerability to climate change risks. We studied what motivates people to take actions to protect their community from climate change risks.
  2. Why was this study done? We examined how collective transilience, that reflects the extent to which people perceive they can persist, adapt flexibly, and change for the better as a community in the face of climate change, is related to the likelihood that people engage in actions to protect their community from climate change risks. We further examined whether higher collective transilience is more strongly associated with actions to protect one’s community from climate change risks than individual transilience (i.e., the extent to which people believe they as an individual can persist, adapt flexibly, and change for the better in the face of climate change).
  3. What did the researchers do and find? We conducted two studies, one in The United States and one in The Netherlands. We found that people do think they can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform as a community in the face of climate change. Yet, they are generally not very likely to engage in actions that may protect their community against climate change risks. As expected, higher transilience was related to stronger intentions to engage in a variety of behaviours that can protect one’s community and oneself from climate change risks. Interestingly, collective transilience was found to better predict intentions to adapt (both at the individual and at the community level) than individual transilience, suggesting that the extent to which people believe their community can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform can promote a wide range of adaptation behaviours.
  4. What do these findings mean? Our findings bring a positive perspective by showing that humans think they have the capacity to adapt and even thrive as a community when adapting to climate change, and the higher this collective transilience, the more likely they are to engage in climate adaptation actions. Future research can examine which factors strengthen collective transilience, and encourage people to engage in actions to protect both themselves and their community from climate change risks, and change for the better. We provide the data and the scripts used to conduct all main analyses reported in the published manuscript.
Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/NZJYHC
Related Identifier IsSupplementTo https://doi.org/10.5964/gep.11353
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/NZJYHC
Provenance
Creator Lozano Nasi, V. ORCID logo; Jans, L. ORCID logo; Steg, L. ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Groningen Digital Competence Centre
Publication Year 2023
Rights CC0-1.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
OpenAccess true
Contact Groningen Digital Competence Centre (University of Groningen)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/csv; application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet; type/x-r-syntax
Size 16113; 57200; 9583; 9690; 10112; 8692
Version 1.2
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Earth and Environmental Science; Environmental Research; Geosciences; Life Sciences; Natural Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences