Abstract Human's abstraction from nature has created a situation where the impacts of an array of environmentally detrimental behaviours are realised across scales, challenging the resilience of at‐risk communities. Complicating this divide is the political ideology gap on issues including nature connectedness, environmental concerns, and climate change beliefs. This research investigated associations between individuals' connection to nature, their climate beliefs, and their perceptions of community resilience along the Texas Gulf Coast through a survey of residents ( n = 1045). Multigroup structural equation modelling was used to examine the relationships between these concepts and whether they varied (or not) across political ideologies. We observed that nature connectedness was positively related to climate change beliefs and subjective evaluations of community resilience. Furthermore, these relationships were stronger for conservatives relative to liberals. Our findings show that connecting to nature enhances perceptions of community adaptive capacity and reinforces beliefs about climate change. This connection also bridges the political divide, offering a practical pathway to overcoming political divisions on climate issues. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Pilgreen et al. (Sat,) studied this question.
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