Psychological perspectives on community resilience and climate change: Insights, examples, and directions for future research

Abstract This chapter makes a case for a focus on climate change community resilience—the study of a community’s capability to flexibly and effectively respond to climate change—in order to understand and promote functionally adaptive responses to climate change. While there is considerable research on the role of individual psychological processes in promoting engagement with climate change, much more research on place-based, community-focused dimensions of climate change psychology is needed. We provide an overview of the broader interdisciplinary perspective on community resilience and highlight psychology’s potential role to contribute further in this literature. Looking forward, we explicate key ways in which both community resilience and psychological research would benefit from their integration, and identify ways of advancing theory and research in this domain.