Ten essentials are presented for community resilience initiatives in the context of achieving a 1.5 °C world: enhance adaptability; take account of shocks and stresses; work horizontally across issues; work vertically across social scales; aggressively reduce carbon emissions; build narratives about climate change; engage directly with futures; focus on climate disadvantage; focus on processes and pathways; and encourage transformations for resilience. Together the essentials highlight that resilience initiatives seeking to retain the status quo will be detrimental when they enable societies to cling to unsustainable activities. Instead, climate resilience initiatives need to be viewed more as a process of transformative social change, where learning, power, inequities and relationships matter. Finally, there is an urgent need for researchers to shift focus away from examining the nature of resilience to accelerating learning about fostering resilience in practice.