Prepararse para lo inesperado: educación para la resiliencia climática en comunidades multilingües

This article presents findings from a qualitative study examining how multilingual immigrant families living in a university town in the southern United States acquire, construct, and apply knowledge about climate hazard preparedness. Drawing on five semi-structured community conversations with participants from South Korea, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, and Latin America, the study examines five interconnected educational dimensions: climate literacy and informal learning processes, linguistic access to emergency information, geographic identity as a risk interpretive framework, perception of environmental change, and the role of community social networks as non-formal educational infrastructure. The analysis reveals that university institutions operate as unequal gateways to emergency knowledge, that language barriers intensify during crises, that residents bring rich transnational environmental knowledge that formal educational programs rarely value, and that informal networks—digital, religious, and interpersonal—fill critical gaps left by institutional preparedness systems. The article concludes with implications for designing climate resilience education programs in multilingual university settings.