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Cartago City, Costa Rica has observed an increase in the damages and losses due to floods and landslides in recent decades. The city faces a challenge to enhance disaster risk management (DRM) capacity in order to reduce increasing disaster risk. This research identifies factors that enhance local DRM capacity in the context of increasing climate‐related events, focusing on the ability of communities that can complement local government's DRM initiative. The study involved 240 household surveys in four high flood risk communities in Cartago and found positive outcomes stemming from communities' perception of global climate change and awareness of local climate‐related disaster risk. Furthermore, the study identified two factors that increase awareness. Despite the communities' higher local climate‐related disaster risk awareness, however, the study found that communities take few disaster risk reduction …