Facing the heat: A descriptive review of the literature on family and community resilience amidst wildfires and climate change

Abstract

Family and community resilience in the contexts of natural disasters and climate change have earned a place of prominence in the research field. This article provides a descriptive review of the literature published between 1997 and 2023 examining family and community resilience in the context of wildfires, climate change, and sustainability. Ninety‐two articles were included and analyzed, with three research questions addressed. Results show family and community resilience as essential to the adaptation process to extreme natural events. Family and community experiences appear to be linked with changes in beliefs, behaviors, and priorities. Findings point to potential connections with sustainability, adaptation and mitigation efforts, and the need for communities to coexist with fire in forest ecosystems. Some gaps in literature are pointed out, including scarcity of data from diverse geographic locations, looking at the family unit perspective, and spanning the entire trajectory of disaster and recovery process.

Celebrating the “good‐enough families”: Family challenges and resilience during global adversity

“…Ambiguous loss, which has been useful in studying specific phenomena, is now relevant for an overarching understanding of the current global experience of loss amid uncertainty. In this special issue, three papers selected the COVID-pandemic as the main adversity (Ceberio, 2024;Medina Centeno, 2024;Pietromonaco & Overall, 2024), a fourth paper chose the war in Ukraine (Vetere & Shimwell, 2024), and a fifth paper examined the wildfires and climate change (Ferreira et al, 2024). Two papers did not focus on a specific type of adversity; however, one examined ways in which families could guard relational security when faced with adversities threatening attachment relationships (Ber astegui & Pitillas, 2024).…”

“…Across studies, the impact of adversity was described at the different systemic levels: communities, whole-families, couples, and parent-children and individuals. Four papers included overviews of selected studies showing how the pandemic impacted families and communities (Ceberio, 2024;Medina Centeno, 2024) and couples (Pietromonaco & Overall, 2024), and how wildfires affected families and communities (Ferreira et al, 2024). Two articles focused on the experience of security, with authors using the attachment framework.…”

“…A similar interplay between stability and change was observed in communities affected by wildfires. Ferreira et al (2024) identified how these communities proactively engaged in actions to deal with the aftermath of the fires, but also resorting to what was already meaningful to them as group, such as traditional celebrations and festivals and other community events where members could reconnect. Finally, this dynamic feature was implicit in the concept of dyadic bicultural competence developed by Hendershot and Johnson (2024) in the context of migrant couples, defined as the couples' collective facility in navigating both dominant and heritage cultural contexts.…”

“…Nowadays, resilience is agreed to be a multisystemic phenomenon nested in relationships (Ungar, 2021). In this issue, an interesting indicator of this relational conceptualization is the use of language that implies the systemic nature of constructs such as resilience or competence, namely family resilience (Ceberio, 2024;Ferreira et al, 2024), community resilience (Ferreira et al, 2024), attachment resilience (Ber astegui & Pitillas, 2024) and bicultural competence (Hendershot & Johnson, 2024).…”

“…An example of the combination of informal, formal, and specialized networks arose in the paper of Ferreira et al (2024) on family and community resilience amid wildfires. Their findings showed how after the fires, local informal multifamily groups were formed in some communities, allowing a space to share accounts and emotions regarding the disaster, mobilize rebuilding efforts, mourn the losses, and build collective stories of resilience and hope.…”