“Community” has been conceptualised in community resilience studies in various ways but is rarely critically explored. While a community can be a place (i.e., a geographical location or shared institution), communities can also be systems of practice (i.e., those belonging to a shared activity or profession), diagnostic identities (i.e., those associated with mental health conditions) and other symbolic relationships (i.e., those with intangible shared meanings and identities, such as religious communities) ^[1][12]. Therefore, disaster survivors can belong to multiple communities (see ^[2][11]).

It is important to acknowledge the mental health burden of disaster-related stressors for communities. The psychological impacts of disasters occur through the direct effects of the extreme event (primary stressors) (e.g., witnessing the collapse of buildings and experiencing physical injuries) and the knock-on consequences of disaster (secondary stressors) (e.g., employment loss, loss of identity and disturbance to community roles) (see ^[3][13] for a review). Secondary stressors can impact mental health and well-being in similar ways to the initial disaster exposure ^[4][14], influencing the long-term mental health burden of disasters. This includes the impact of collective trauma,  defined as the group-level psychological impact arising from a shared experience of a highly distressing event, generally involving a fear of death or injury. Such collective trauma can harm individuals’ psychological functioning and therefore the social fabric of the community ^[5][6][15,16].

The extant literature has focused on the individual mental health outcomes outcomes of disaster exposure [17], which can impact communities of diagnostic identity. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)  following disaster exposure is among the most studied mental health disorders (for reviews, see ^[7][8][18,19]). However, disasters also produce an increase in experiences of grief, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, substance abuse and other stress-related problems. Some manifestations of the psychological impacts of disasters may vary between Western and non-Western cultures. For example, after the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, trauma was often expressed via somatic complaints, such as headaches and bodily pain ^[9][20].

Young people are particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts of disasters. In a seminal review of the disaster literature, Norris et al. ^[8][19] found that the psychological impairments of young people were elevated and extreme compared to adults. More recent studies support the idea that younger age is associated with elevated PTSD symptoms (e.g., ^{[10][11][12][13][14]}[21,22,23,24,25]). Economic inequality can impact resilience, as young people living in poverty are likely to have fewer tangible resources to harness to cope with disaster stressors, therefore heightening their risk [26]. They may also be more likely to experience chronic or multigenerational trauma pre-disaster, which is exacerbated by the impacts of disasters ^[15][27]. The risk factors for PTSD in children that were identified in a review of eight studies include female gender, disaster exposure, negative coping and lack of social support ^[16][28]. Many reasons have been suggested as to why girls may be more vulnerable to the impacts of disasters. These include gender differences in cognitive appraisals of threat ^[17][18][29,30], gendered vulnerability to the consequences of disasters, such as a rise in violence, increased mortality risk and economic vulnerability ^[19][20][21][31,32,33]. Alternatively, the putative greater vulnerability of girls to the impacts of disasters may be a consequence of the gendered expectations of adults (i.e., parents and teachers), who often complete quantitative measures on behalf of their children ^[22][26]. Such expectations may also determine that girls carry the burden of domestic chores and caring responsibilities post-disaster, which can impede their return to schooling post-disaster ^[23][34]. This emphasises the importance of research that directly gauges the experiences of girls, particularly from marginalised communities.

Despite extensive research focused on the mental health impacts of disasters, in most circumstances, disasters do not lead to serious, long-term psychological impairment. Methodological limitations such as sampling biases have led to a historical overreporting of dysfunction in trauma research ^[24][35]. More recent, innovative techniques using longitudinal trajectories of disaster survivors have shown that sustained psychological challenges rarely exceed 30% ^[25][17]. Studies such as those by Bonanno et al. ^[25][17] and Masten and Narayan ^[26][36] review the multiple factors that promote adaptive, resilient functioning after disasters at the individual level. This includes individual differences, such as personality and beliefs, cognitive appraisal processes and social resources, which interact to guide the coping strategies that an individual employs when experiencing adversity ^[27][37]. However, resilience research has attracted criticism for promoting a neoliberal agenda that neglects the structural inequalities that impede the resilience of individuals ^[28][29][38,39].

An alternative approach is to explore resilience as a collective phenomenon that operates at the level of the community ^[30][40]. Community resilience has been defined in several ways, but researchers generally agree that such resilience is an “adaptive capacity” that supports the community to cope with adversity (e.g., ^[31][32][33][10,41,42]). Norris and colleagues’ ^[31][10] well-cited model theorises successful community adaption as a process emerging from four adaptive capacities: economic development, social capital, community competence and information and communication. The model has been referenced in many studies exploring resilience in non-Western contexts (e.g., ^[34][35][36][43,44,45]).

Although community resilience is far less extensively researched in psychology than resilience at the individual level, there is a historical precedent in psychological research for considering the strength-oriented responses of communities to disasters. Research on high-income settings has long shown that in public emergencies, communities come together to overcome adversity (e.g., ^[37][38][39][46,47,48]). Numerous terms have been used to describe the positive affinity shared between groups who experience collective adversity, including “brotherhood of pain” ^[39][48], “altruistic communities” ^[40][49] and “therapeutic communities” ^[41][50]. In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, these terms capture the elevated levels of spontaneous assistance, support and cohesion demonstrated by survivors. Altruistic communities refers to the harmony of disaster survivors who reciprocally support each other; these responses have the potential to be therapeutic by alleviating the adverse psychological effects of experiencing a disaster [50]. Social psychologists have interpreted these collective responses through the lens of the social identity approach ^[42][51]; this explains the cohesion, solidarity and coordination that occurs in the face of adversity as the product of a shared “disaster survivor” identity ^{[43][44][45][46]}[52,53,54,55]. However, most research in this area focuses on the immediate disaster response, while the community dynamics that facilitate (or impede) long-term recovery are rarely explored. The research that exists in this area yields mixed results: Ntontis et al. ^[47][56] reported that after flooding in the UK, secondary stressors promoted community support beyond the initial emergency, whereas Paton et al. ^[48][57] found that after the Christchurch earthquake, community groups were transient and dissipated once their survival needs had been met. However, there is a notable absence of research in this area from non-Western contexts. Research in non-Western contexts is important, as cultural belief systems and practices influence processes of coping and adaption to adversity ^[49][50][58,59]. Therefore, while some determinants of resilience may resonate cross-culturally, their presentation and impact can be context-dependent and culturally nuanced ^[50][51][59,60].

In tandem with the rising popularity of the concept in psychological literature, resilience has become a policy buzzword in disaster risk management since the development of the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015 ^[52][7]. The more recent Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 ^[53][61] was developed to build the resilience of nations and communities to disasters. Beyond early definitions of resilience connotating a “bouncing back” following an external shock ^[54][62], the more recent disaster literature emphasises the need to bounce back better ^[55][63]. The “Build Back Better” agenda argues that disaster relief should be coupled with long-term development objectives to reduce vulnerabilities to future natural hazards as a “new normal” is sought ^[56][64]. This means that the discourse of resilience can bridge the gap between humanitarian crisis intervention and longer-term sustainable development goals ^[57][65]. However, it is important to note that despite the compelling narrative of “Build Back Better” that is promoted extensively following disasters, long-term development projects are not always delivered in practice, particularly in countries that are fragile and experience weak governance, as seen following the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti ^[58][59][66,67]. More recently, the “Building Back Fairer” agenda asserts that disaster response must prioritise social equity to reduce the structural drivers that exacerbate inequality, making marginalised populations particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts of disasters ^[60][68].

However, the concept of resilience in disaster management runs the risk of becoming a set of top-down attributes decided by international agencies ^[61][69]. Since a hazard becomes a disaster due to an interplay of social, political and economic factors that shape the vulnerability of the community ^[62][70], it is the most marginalised, poorest communities who are likely to experience the most negative impacts. Therefore, such voices should be at the forefront of interventions designed to strengthen community resilience. This must include children, who suffer the most and have been recognised for their potential to actively contribute to community recovery and resilience (e.g., ^[63][71]), but whose voices are rarely included in research.