11.1.1 Community resilience has diverse origins and multiple definitions

In everyday language, resilience has two meanings: Elasticity, and being able to spring back into shape after deformation; and a more subjective meaning of the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and having “toughness” (Resilience, 2017). The idea of community resilience can be linked historically to at least two other streams of research using the idea of resilience as a metaphor for complex processes that reflect these everyday meanings. The first, and probably the most influential, was work in the early 1970s characterizing how ecosystems responded to stress and change (Holling, 1973). Over time, this work, with its beginnings in the study of ecological systems, has grown to recognize the interplay of human and natural systems, and efforts increasingly focus on investigating the ways in which social and ecological resilience are both similar and are contextually connected (e.g., Adger, 2000; Berkes, Colding & Folke, 2008; Magis, 2010; Ostrom, 2009; Walker, Holling, Carpenter & Kinzig, 2004).

In contrast to how resilience is often viewed in ecosystems, researchers in the social sciences studying human development tend to examine resilience in terms of individual responses to adversity, coping behaviors, and preparedness for future hardships. This work grows out of research on protective factors that attenuate the impact of risks associated with childhood development under adversity (e.g., work on poverty; Garmezy, 1991). This work has also undergone development over time, with researchers arguing for a study of social and developmental processes rather than cataloging static factors (Egeland, Carlson & Sroufe, 1993; Rutter, 1987). Outside of the childhood development literature, researchers studying people’s responses to trauma (including large scale disasters) began to recognize that traumatic experiences do not always result in uniformly negative outcomes. Instead, some people show significant resilience and even post-traumatic growth in the context of challenging events (Bonanno, 2004). To date, however, merging the different conceptions of resilience together or developing frameworks capable of incorporating both resilience perspectives simultaneously has proven difficult. Furthermore, in comparison with infrastructure and ecosystems resilience, the study on individual and community resilience is considerably less well-developed.

11.1.2 Defining and studying resilience in the context of communities and climate change

Work on community resilience is rooted strongly in research and policy work on disaster response and disaster risk reduction. As discussed by Cutter et al. (2008), US federal government analysis of the human and financial consequences of disaster risks motivated the development of programs for disaster-resistant communities which included not only disaster resilient infrastructure, but also social coordination, communication, and planning processes. This work was important in prompting the development of community resilience as an organizing principle in policy analysis and scholarship. Three concepts closely related to community resilience are vulnerability, adaptive capacity, and agency. Although vulnerability and resilience can be seen as two sides of the same coin, they are also defined separately in some analyses. For example, Cutter et al. (2008) define vulnerabilities as the inherent pre-event characteristics that create the potential for harm, but resilience as not only static buffering characteristics but also the abilities of the community to respond flexibly and productively when confronted with a challenge.

This definition of community resilience has close connection to the idea of adaptive capacity (Brown & Westaway, 2011; Cutter et al., 2008). Brown and Westaway (2011) define adaptive capacity as the “set of latent characteristics, or the potential, needed to adapt to climate change and the ability to be actively involved in the process of change” (p. 324). Agency is also an important element of their analysis of resilience. Drawing from McLaughlin and Dietz (2008), Brown and Westaway define agency as the ability of individuals and groups to make choices and have a causal role in their own history. In contrast to more static conceptions of resilience, the agency perspective highlights that individuals and communities are not passive spectators whose vulnerability or resilience is a product of factors exogenous to their actions. We agree with this perspective, conceptualizing community resilience as both the static resources and characteristics that buffer a community’s vulnerabilities, and also the agentic qualities of community members and the community as a whole that allow it to adaptively prepare, respond, and grow in response to environmental challenges or harmful events.

Several important prior reviews provide frameworks for community resilience that are in many respects consistent with our perspective, and may be usefully applied to psychological research. Cutter et al.'s (2008) disaster resilience of place (DROP) model presents both a temporal framework for understanding how community resilience operates in response to natural disasters and also a set of categories for measuring what they call “inherent resilience.” These categories include ecological, social, economic, institutional, infrastructure, and “community competence” variables. As Cutter et al. note, in most instances, these categories of resilience have not been extensively operationalized or studied at the local level.

Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, and Pfefferbaum (2008) provide a comprehensive review and framework for community resilience that is rooted in both the disaster-risk and community psychology literatures. They argue that community resilience should be conceptualized as both an embedded set of community capacities that aid in successfully responding to challenges and also as a strategy for promoting effective readiness and responses to challenges. Their framework identifies four categories of capacities underlying resilience (economic development, information and communication, social capital, and community competence), each with multiple components. Importantly, they argue against viewing these aspects as a set of static indicators, and stress the importance of understanding them as networked and causally dynamic properties. From their perspective, strategies that promote community resilience will focus not only on building static buffering capacities, but also on increasing the dynamic properties of community resilience by understanding their operation and interconnections. Norris et al. (2008) category of community competence (including components of community action, collective efficacy, community flexibility, and reflective and problem-solving skills), in particular, represents aspects of resilience that require a psychological process perspective to both measure and facilitate. The roles of these different community characteristics in promoting resilience are discussed at length in subsequent sections.

11.2.1 Climate change is globally pressing, but locally experienced

While climate change is a complex and geographically diffuse phenomenon, many of the most immediate impacts of climate change (e.g., extreme weather hazards) are localized, being experienced in individual communities at different times and on different scales (IPCC, 2014). In many cases, these communities are vulnerable to vastly different types of projected climate change impacts. Communities also have different political, cultural, socio-economic, and environmental histories, which raise important questions about how to most effectively manage climate change through policy support and behavioral changes in these different contexts (Adger, Barnett, Brown, Marshall & O’Brien, 2013). The processes at play in how a community manages climate change in Miami Beach as compared to a town in the rural mountain West of the United States may involve different forms of engagement, steps for preparedness (due to different potential impacts), and resilience efforts. For example, Miami Beach faces threats from salt water intrusion and increasing sunny day flooding, as well as ever-increasing threats from the consequences of tropical storms. Thus, community engagement in this area must focus both on increasing local investment in infrastructure changes to cope with the creeping sea-level rise and on building community disaster resilience to cope in the aftermath of future storms (e.g., fostering stronger social ties among community members to promote cohesive disaster responses). In contrast, the Western town faces the threat of wildfire as well as water insecurity due to drought risks, which demand different forms of resilience planning and community preparedness. Thus, in the Western United States, local communities face different challenges in building engagement for local neighborhood action (e.g., brush cutting), as well as individual and community-level action for water conservation. Community-level perspectives are vital in order to account for these different adaptive challenges.

Aside from the need for community-level perspectives to account for reactions to community-level issues, the decisions that individuals make to deal with climate change are influenced (or constrained) by their context (c.f. Baum & Gross, 2017). In the case of adaptation behaviors, the opportunities available to individuals may be especially constrained by their community capabilities (e.g., the capacity for migration, the availability of emergency response infrastructure and resources; Black, Bennett, Thomas & Beddington, 2011; Evans et al., 2016). While there are undoubtedly some psychological processes that influence climate change attitude formation and decision-making across all contexts, the role of any particular psychological factor depends upon the affordances and constraints that come into play based on the characteristics of a community and the particular challenges that it faces. For example, a person whose household is in an area with high risk of wildfire may make individual decisions about fire hardening/protecting based not just on a calculus of individual risk but also about community risk and action. Being in a community where there is a grassroots effort to work together to “protect the town” may evoke psychological processes of community loyalty, identity, and responsibility for homeowners, in addition to the individual “rational” calculus about protecting one’s own personal structures from risk.

11.2.2 Community-level research can inform and transcend multiple levels of analysis

The majority of research on the psychology of climate change has focused on individuals as the unit of analysis and agent of change (although several of the chapters in the present volume represent exceptions): How individuals’ worldviews shape their perceptions of climate change, determinants of individuals’ sustainable behavior changes, and factors that increase or decrease individual support for national-level policy changes have all been studied in considerable depth. Fewer studies in the climate change psychology literature have adopted an explicit focus on local communities and regional actors as units of analysis in their investigations. This community-centered approach to climate change psychology raises questions such as how the interaction of individual and intergroup dynamics influence community climate change decision-making, whether factors that influence individuals’ support for national-level climate change policy similarly motivate engaged action in local community initiatives, and more broadly how the perspectives from the extant literature on individual climate change decision-making apply in the context of local community actions and politics.

At the micro-level, individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, embedded within social settings, are the primary focus of scholarship. For example, researchers may investigate whether a person chooses to bike to work instead of driving a car, depending on their attitudes toward the environment or the social norms of their personal networks (Heinen, van Wee & Maat, 2010). A limitation of this research is that individual behavior changes vary widely, both in terms of their potential impact and in the extent to which people can “choose” to engage in them (see Chapter 6: Contributions of psychology to limiting climate change: Opportunities through consumer behavior). For example, the choice to rely on public transportation is not available to many citizens. And, in an area with narrow roads or no bike lanes, it may simply be too dangerous for individuals to commute by bicycle as opposed to car (Heinen et al., 2010; Stern, 2000). The environmental impact of bicycling versus driving will also depend on the type and distance of commute required in that particular community.

A community resilience approach to addressing climate change requires a shift in focus towards the center space between the micro-level (i.e., individuals) and the macro-level (e.g., entire populations), referred to as the meso-level of analysis (Bergström & Dekker, 2014). This middle ground allows researchers to look at groups of people in context—such as neighborhoods, organizations, or cities—as the primary focus. Strengthening community resilience to climate change requires attending to specific features of local environments, and building on local strengths and vulnerabilities. Due to their wide variability, these features are often treated as contextual “noise” in psychological research, with rigorous efforts undertaken to control their influence on variables of interest. However, this individualist approach attempts to extract individuals from their environment in ways that lead to a narrow interpretation of resilience and may threaten ecological validity (Parker, 2015). In contrast, distinctive features of local communities become the foreground of community-based research, as they are understood to envelop and shape community responses to climate change (Okvat & Zautra, 2011; Trickett, 2009). Moreover, attending to groups of people embedded in places can shed light on individual decision-making or underscore a need for higher-level policy change, thus bridging micro- and macro-level understandings through community-level analyses (Bergström & Dekker, 2014; Ross & Berkes, 2014). Revisiting the earlier example, understanding distinctive features of communities can help to identify micro-level barriers to individuals’ use of existing bicycle-friendly infrastructure (e.g., feeling unsafe), or macro-level factors underlying a lack of political momentum to invest in local public transportation (e.g., absence of federal incentives).

By explicitly attending to contextual features of local environments, community resilience research offers unique avenues through which to examine and promote the health and well-being of individuals and communities in the context of climate change. This presents an exciting opportunity for psychological theorizing and research; a better understanding of the psychological processes involved in climate change decision-making and resilience at the community level could aid in the production of psychosocial assessments to complement and contextualize the geophysical assessments that currently comprise most region-specific adaptation plans.

11.2.3 Climate change necessitates a psychology of community adaptation and resilience

The growing consensus that some impacts of climate change are already underway, and others are unlikely to be prevented regardless of current efforts (IPCC, 2014), makes the study of community resilience vital. The rapid progression of climatic changes and their implications for extreme weather and agricultural disruption (e.g., Fischer & Knutti, 2015; Trenberth, Fasullo & Shepherd, 2015) have substantially increased attention to the need for adaptation to climate change, in contrast with the historically predominant focus on mitigation/prevention (Moser & Boykoff, 2013; Moser & Ekstrom, 2010; Moser, 2010). The realization of the need for adaptation, and its implications for well-being and resilience, has resulted in a substantial interest in the influence of characteristics such as values and culture on local adaptive capacity and decision-making (Barnett, Tschakert, Head & Adger, 2016), with some scholars specifically pointing to the need to understand communities as key actors in promoting healthy adaptation to climate change and resilience to disaster impacts (Adger et al., 2009; Adger et al., 2013).

In response to calls for more research on adaptation in communities, psychological and public health researchers are beginning to contribute to initiatives aimed at climate change adaptation and resilience by applying, for example, principles from the literature on depression, stress, and coping processes to better understand individual-level resilience in the wake of climate change (e.g., Berry, Bowen & Kjellstrom, 2010; Clayton et al., 2015; Keim, 2008; Nurse, Basher, Bone & Bird, 2010; Reser & Swim, 2011). This work discusses how climate change impacts (e.g., weather disasters) may increase mental health problems often already associated with the loss of one’s property and destruction of cherished places, loss of life, and enhanced financial strain from disaster preparedness and response. Thus, greater attention to the individual mental health needs of community members may be necessary and require additional resources. Aside from this interest in mental health, the body of literature discussing psychological dimensions of resilience and adaptation to climate change, especially those encompassing the interaction of individual and collective psychological processes, is very limited (Riemer & Reich, 2011; Riemer, 2010).

In addition to the individual-centered study of resilience, psychological research on community resilience can help respond to the crucial need for interdisciplinary adaptation scholarship (Clayton et al., 2015, 2016). This is because, at its core, community resilience research aims to enhance adaptive capacity (Folke, Hahn, Olsson & Norberg, 2005). Strengthening community resilience involves supporting community members’ knowledge, capacities, and skills. This includes their awareness of the problem (e.g., via risk perceptions; vulnerability assessments), knowledge of potential solutions (e.g., via social learning; self-organization), and ability to enact solutions through policies and programs to further build adaptive capacity (e.g., via social mobilization; community-based planning and organization), all of which are well within the domain of psychology. Understanding and strengthening these processes are essential to protecting safety and well-being of individuals and communities. As such, community resilience research can both expand psychology’s role in adaptation scholarship and respond to an increasingly urgent need. The study of adaptive capacity and resilience in particular necessitates context and place-specific research programs due to the fact that the climatic processes at play and the specific behaviors to be targeted by researchers are going to vary considerably from region to region (Adger et al., 2013; Barnett et al., 2014; Barnett & Waters, 2016).

11.2.4 Community-focused initiatives provide psychologists with an opportunity to inform and influence policy-making

An enhanced emphasis on place-based, community-focused research initiatives has the potential to provide scholars with a direct route to apply their research to the policy and planning process. One of the major obstacles to concerted climate change action has been the persistent political gridlock in high-emissions countries such as the United States (Dunlap, McCright & Yarosh, 2016). While gridlock may also exist in local politics, a focus on climate change in a way that is locally relevant and intended to practically benefit communities could reduce the psychological distance of climate change (McDonald, Chai & Newell, 2015), shifting the focus of action away from reinforcing political identities (Kahan, 2012; Kahan, Jenkins-Smith & Braman, 2011) and toward enacting solutions, and thus enabling concerted efforts in spite of national and/or international legislative impasse. The capacity for community-focused initiatives to attenuate the negative influence of political gridlock on climate change action warrants investigation (e.g., the Southeast Florida Evidence-based Science Communication Initiative; Cultural Cognition Project, 2017). Furthermore, given the complexity of national and international policy, it can be difficult even in favorable political conditions for social scientists to directly apply research findings to influence the decision-making process at this macro-level scale. Influencing public perceptions and decision processes in local or regional politics and community deliberations may thus be a (relatively) direct, and more accessible, route for psychologists to engage with citizens and apply their research.

A focus on local issues and community-based group processes when studying climate change psychology offers researchers the opportunity to move “out of the lab” and to test findings in applied settings, a theme which has been discussed by a number of scholars recently in the context of climate change psychology and communications (Kahan & Carpenter, 2017; Kahan, 2014; Levine & Kline, 2017). As an example of organizational response, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues has recognized the promise of place-based, localized approaches through new funding initiatives for psychologists working to improve state and local policy decision-making. University-community partnerships may be a promising vehicle for enabling psychologists to apply their research to community resilience needs (e.g., Cooperative Extension System; www.extension.org). Community-focused initiatives could also be a natural locus for spurring interdisciplinary scholarship, another emerging and pressing theme highlighted by climate change psychologists in recent years (Clayton et al., 2016). Studying and enhancing community resilience to climate change necessitates a focus on the psychological, sociological, and political environments as well as the potential geophysical stressors and infrastructure strengths and weaknesses.

Therefore, there is a compelling rationale for psychologists to work to produce and apply insights on how to best promote community resilience to climate change. However, as Riemer and Reich (2011) note (in their introduction to a special section of the American Journal of Community Psychology on community psychology and climate change), the literature to date focusing explicitly on climate change and community psychology is very limited, especially in comparison to other issues such as social justice and race relations. Furthermore, this research area has not witnessed much growth in the years since Riemer and Reich’s (2011) paper. Nevertheless, the emerging contributions from psychology, coupled with the aforementioned interdisciplinary research literatures on resilience climate change adaptation, have the potential to bolster our understanding of community resilience.

11.3.1 Applying the findings: characteristics of resilient communities

With these insights in mind, we can sketch more specifically what a climate-change resilient community looks like. Perhaps most importantly, such communities will have developed what Norris and colleagues refer to as community competence with the capacity for collective action and a sense of collective empowerment to creatively and flexibly respond to challenges. This community competence would be reflected in problem solving abilities embedded in political structures but also at grass-roots level organizing. However, such community competence is likely to be developed and built over time by the development of the social capital of the community (Norris et al., 2008; Robin & Elah, 2011). The people in resilient communities have a deep attachment to place and community (Cutter et al., 2008), with strong bonds between community members and active participation in community life through diverse and impactful community organizations.

Communities striving to develop greater resilience may best consider the development of community competence and social capital as these can progressively scaffold and build one another (Aldrich & Meyer, 2015; Poortinga, 2012). Indeed, outside of crisis periods, development of community social capital and competence should probably be the major implicit goal of most community organizations. For example, imagine a community in which people have developed a community organization whose explicit goal is intergenerational community service and learning, in which projects are oriented around bringing together and doing service by and for people across generations. As one project, high school and college students might be paired with retired contractors to build community housing modeled after the approach of Habitat for Humanity. In another project, the local historical society could partner with local schools to train students to gather oral histories from the oldest community members about their life and community history. These projects would both build social capital and, because of the organizing required for action, also build community competence. This increased community agency and embedded knowledge and training may then be called upon and come to the fore when the community is developing climate change risk preparedness plans or when it faces an acute crisis of some kind.

Once communities have developed strong social capital and community competence, other aspects of climate change resilience may thus be more easily and effectively developed. A resilient community needs a strong base of economic development that is fair and equitable and which does not place vulnerable community members at disproportionate risk to climate change induced hazards. It also needs effective communication and information methods, some of which may be specialized for disaster preparedness and response, but which are also grounded less formally in the social networks and organizations that are developed through community competence and social capital.

Lastly, climate-change resilient communities should have planning, development, and infrastructure that help the community adapt to climate change risks (Cutter et al., 2008). These include planning and zoning to protect communities from developing in areas that face long terms risks (such as due to flooding), as well as infrastructure specifically to protect the community such as seawalls. Importantly, as noted by Cutter et al. (2008), community resilience also rests in part in the ecological resilience of the natural community in which people reside. Rather than being only a passive resource, the local ecology is something that can be made less resilient through poor use or potentially made more resilient with judicious human involvement (e.g., agricultural set-asides as a native species seed bank or for storm run-off buffering).

11.5.1 Identify and investigate structural and psychological barriers as well as opportunities for community resilience

Given the inherent difficulties in investigating complex, multifaceted topics such as resilience, identifying, developing, and empirically investigating community-level engagement may help inform novel theoretical frameworks of how individual and collective psychological processes interact, while also shedding light on vital practical considerations for promoting community resilience. This may involve considering the barriers to entry into community-engaged research (e.g., access to local planners, developing the trust of community members, availability of resources, and practicalities of the research), means of overcoming those barriers (e.g., psychologically informed community-level interventions of communications strategies), as well as identifying novel opportunities to study psychological processes underlying resilience-related behaviors. Modifying existing influential frameworks, such as Cutter et al. (2008) and Norris et al. (2008), to include perspectives more extensively informed by the psychological research may be a valuable first step. These existing frameworks, for example, identify topics such as collective action, place attachment, and efficacy as important elements of resilience, but leave room for substantial expansion and incorporation of knowledge from the psychological literature on how to best conceptualize and measure these constructs. Thus, integrating the valuable work from community, social, environmental, and political psychology literatures discussed throughout this volume in order to expand current frameworks of resilience could be a compelling first step toward a more integrated, psychologically informed framework.

11.5.2 Expand the investigation of collective climate change psychology

Collaborative, collective action initiatives for community resilience, which are adaptive in nature, are understudied as a form of collective action (See Chapter 8: Environmental protection through societal change: What psychologyknows about collective climate action—and what it needs to find out). Existing theories and frameworks of individual climate change psychology should therefore be examined in the context of collective processes, group dynamics, and community decision-making. This involves more than just testing micro- and macro- level concepts in the meso-level context, implying the development of a theoretically informed but practically applicable collective climate change psychology at the meso-level. Psychology’s role in social movements scholarship, within and beyond environmental action, has largely focused on a “politics of demand” (e.g., public protest), rather than on a “politics of the act,” such as collaborative projects for community resilience (Trott, 2016). Whereas demands-based forms of collective action consist primarily of identity- or issue-based groups demanding rights, recognition, or policy reform, action-based groups pursue alternative routes to social change by “locating power and possibility in the local and the everyday” within self-organized communities (Trott, 2016, p. 269). Through a collective action lens, the creative and prosocial resilience-building efforts taking place in community settings come into focus as processes of collective self-intervention and collaborative experimentation to support individual and community well-being. These more unconventional, process-oriented approaches to collective action have received relatively little attention by psychologists when compared to more visible, events-based activism such as marches and rallies (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014). Therefore, this is a particularly promising domain for psychologists to contribute and would complement the ongoing research on other forms of climate change collective action (Adger, 2003; Bamberg, Rees & Seebauer, 2015; Louis, 2009; van Zomeren, Spears & Leach, 2010).

There is also a growing recognition of the need to test the applicability of these more individualized psychological theories in the context of real-world collective decision-making (e.g., Kahan & Carpenter, 2017). Community psychology is in harmony with this view; with its experience in the study of local empowerment, it can help to inform such investigations and offer a unique context in which to study collective climate change psychology. Researchers should therefore continue to examine the extent to which psychological theories of climate change beliefs and action apply and inform engagement and policy in regions experiencing different potential climate change impacts. This contextualization and expansion of the psychology literature may help psychologists maximize their influence on decision processes.

11.5.3 Contextualize resilience research to address region-specific adaptation problems

Because different regions have different cultural, economic, political, and geophysical processes, understandings of community resilience must be contextualized in place-based approaches to meet region-specific problems. Thus, rather than adopting a generic idea of community resilience as a factor that may facilitate successful adaptation to climate change, researchers must develop context-specific ideas about the facets of community resilience that are important in the locality where they are conducting research. From a psychologist’s point of view, this opens up a series of exciting research directions. How do different types of community dynamics and histories influence receptivity to different types of resilience policies? Does community resilience to climate change involve different psychological principles and processes in rural versus urban areas, or in areas prone to drought versus flooding? Do different climate change communication strategies work more or less effectively depending on the dynamics of a community? These examples touch only the surface of the many questions and avenues of research open to psychologists through the examination of community resilience, especially as it pertains to adaptation. Making strides in this direction, community psychologists are developing resources like the Community Toolbox, which includes a system by which people from anywhere around the globe are encouraged to submit questions about how research findings might be applied to their own setting; community psychologists are available to respond with suggestions of how to use the research. In the sustainability realm, Silka, McGreavy and Hart (in press) have advanced an analysis of generalizable strategies for learning across these different contexts. Scholars from other areas of psychology studying climate change might also consider becoming involved in such initiatives, and future research in this domain might consider using this as a case study to develop full-fledged frameworks and region-specific application of resilience principles.

11.5.4 Foster interdisciplinary collaboration across natural and social sciences

To understand and promote community resilience in the face of climate change, interdisciplinary collaboration across the natural and social sciences is essential. However, given competing priorities and incentives, the implementation of such programs of research can be complicated. Connecting on issues of direct applied importance, such as focusing on specific local outcomes (e.g., applying strategies to increase voter turnout for newly developed local adaptation policies) could be a fruitful avenue for fostering effective inter- and trans-disciplinary work centered around goals of mutual interest in responding to climate change. Therefore, we encourage psychologists to bring their research into conversation with other disciplines and approaches to studying climate change and resilience. For example, the integration of psychological perspectives on collective action and efficacy with existing frameworks such as the socio-ecological resilience framework (e.g., Adger, Hughes, Folke, Carpenter & Rockström, 2005; Berkes et al. 2008) would be a welcomed advance. This focus on context-specific outcomes to guide interdisciplinary investigations involving psychologists could also be a prime opportunity for contributing to the growing interest in the study of coupled human and natural systems (Liu et al., 2007). Collaboration between natural and social scientists, as well as collaboration with local citizens (Ballard & Belsky, 2010; Jordan, Ballard & Phillips, 2012) may also advance the capacity to develop and implement effective regional climate change adaptation plans that involve both geophysical and psychosocial perspectives.

11.5.5 Explore community-university partnerships and other engagement opportunities

It is vital that psychologists explore new avenues of engagement with the populations and communities they are seeking to benefit. As with interdisciplinary research, these approaches can be difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, to advance a nuanced yet applicable scholarship of community resilience, partnerships with stakeholders can be immensely useful and generative. These partnerships may take a variety of different forms. For example, community-university partnerships, such as the cooperative extension programs carried out by land-grant universities in the United States are an opportunity for scholars to work with members of their communities on developing programs and interventions. Programs aimed at developing community resilience profiles in different states, or collaborating on the development of regional climate change adaptation plans, are just two examples of ways in which these community-university partnerships could be beneficial. Psychologists might also consider other engagement opportunities for disseminating knowledge to inform public policy and to generate local interest in new projects, such as through contributing op-eds to local newspapers, or serving on local scientific advisory panels. In addition to scholarly outreach, such engagement could also generate future community collaborations and inform the development of novel research questions. Community engagement and outreach would thus both advance the applicability of psychology for community resilience to climate change as well as uncover new directions for scholarly pursuit.

11.5.6 Scale up community resilience research

While there is much to be gained by adding a focus on the community to that on the individual, much remains outside community control. Some of the “levers” producing climate change are well beyond the borders of a community, and climate change is unlikely to be eradicated through the actions of a single community. As such, researchers should consider the ways in which their findings could be applicable both within and across contexts to the greatest degree possible. For example, researchers should consider approaches for studying communities that can contribute to the understanding of issues in larger geographical contexts—such as watersheds, large water bodies, and oceans—where social capital opportunities may be different and where contact between people may take forms other than face-to-face interactions. Future research and practice needs to bring together studies of the individual and the community, and develop means of both integrating and scaling up psychological research.