How trust shapes individual resilience to natural hazards: a systematic review

Trust is recognised as a critical element of disaster risk reduction; it shapes how people perceive risks, mobilise resources, and respond to hazards. Here, trust is defined as an individual's confidence in the ability and/ or intention of a system to act in their best interest. Importantly, many studies do not distinguish between ability- and intention-trust or acknowledge that such a distinction exists. Here, we present a systematic review of 100 articles and book chapters published between 2000 and 2025 which reveals that trust can both strengthen and weaken resilience to hazard events, depending on geographical factors, cultural context, hazard type, and the parties in whom trust is placed (e.g., government, community, scientific institutions, or personal beliefs). From the 100 studies, we identified 209 relationships between trust and individuals' resilience to natural hazards. We find that in the majority of case studies, trust is associated with increased resilience (58%), compared with trust being associated with decreased resilience (33%), or no change to resilience (10%). Our findings highlight the need for clarity when defining or theorising trust, and recognise the dynamic and context-dependent nature of trust when seeking to improve resilience to support effective disaster risk reduction.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11069-025-07816-w.