Governments at all levels are facing increasingly frequent, complex, and costly disaster risks, while the systems used to manage them are fragmented across agencies and jurisdictions. In response, a growing number of states and localities are adopting comprehensive resilience plans—intentional, cross-sector strategies designed to align responsibilities, funding, and priorities around reducing risk before disasters occur.

Recent developments highlight that shift. For instance, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (R) signed disaster resilience legislation in April to create a chief resilience officer position to formalize cross-agency coordination and statewide disaster planning. The move reflects a wider policy trend: Mitigation of specific or localized hazards remains a critical foundation for predisaster planning, but states are also recognizing the need for broader frameworks to coordinate across agencies, align long-term priorities, and address complex, cross-sector risks.

Hazard mitigation plans are no longer enough

For more than two decades, hazard mitigation planning—strategizing to address local risks and specific types of emergencies—has formed the backbone of disaster policy. This legacy dates to the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, which linked access to federal funding to predisaster planning, helping make hazard mitigation plans a standard feature of state and local emergency management initiatives. As a result, relatively narrow planning guidance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) still informs how many states and localities organize that work today.

FEMA defines hazard mitigation as sustained action to reduce long-term risk to people and property from natural hazards and their effects. In practice, hazard mitigation planning is an often-siloed, hazard-specific, emergency-management-driven process. At the same time, it also is shaped by federally required elements, funding rules, cost-effectiveness expectations, and compliance procedures, which FEMA’s guidance makes clear are central to the plans themselves.

Although the hazard mitigation planning framework remains important, it typically serves a more limited purpose than today’s disaster-related risks demand. Since 2000, the number and cost of major disasters have risen sharply, and state and local governments are increasingly being asked to manage more interconnected, cross-sector, and complex risks. 

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The National Conference of State Legislatures reported in 2023 that resilience planning, emergency preparedness, and hazard mitigation are closely related, but that resilience planning “goes further” by addressing underlying vulnerabilities; linking environmental, social, and economic sectors; and drawing on expertise from across government. An Urban Institute study similarly found that state hazard mitigation plans often function more as summaries of activities and tools for meeting federal requirements than as strategic, comprehensive plans. And a Louisiana-focused study reached a similar conclusion, arguing that hazard mitigation planning has often been shaped more by compliance and grant access than by long-term, integrated strategy. Other research has shown that these plans often fail to account for future land-use and development trends, remain weakly linked to other plans with regulatory force, and include long lists of actions that are not well prioritized.

The need to evolve beyond traditional hazard mitigation planning reflects the nature of the risks governments are trying to manage. Research shows that a single event can trigger cascading effects that spread across sectors, geographies, and time horizons. Similarly, disasters can compound one another, and avoiding that outcome requires addressing the root causes of different types of risk simultaneously through earlier and more comprehensive action—an approach often missed by narrow planning efforts.

Resilience plans help fill the gap

Strong comprehensive resilience plans do more than describe hazards. They also highlight the multiple benefits of reducing overall risk: protecting lives and property while also strengthening local economies, improving environmental conditions, supporting public health, and addressing longer-term vulnerabilities. Research has found that more holistic investments in adaptation often generate benefits beyond avoided losses, including economic, social, and environmental gains. In other words, these plans should help organize action, not just catalog threats. 

Further, although traditional hazard mitigation often leans on cost-benefit analysis to justify expenditures, research shows that this approach is less suited to assessing the value of planning, coordination, or other system-level measures, which may be difficult to monetize. Broader planning frameworks can help governments identify, prioritize, and justify investments whose value exceeds what conventional cost-benefit tools tend to capture.

Hazard mitigation plans remain essential for reducing risk and accessing federal support. But the evidence suggests that they serve a particular function and, on their own, don't sufficiently support the alignment of agencies, funding, priorities, and implementation around the multifaceted risks governments face today.

Comprehensive resilience plans offer something different, an interconnected strategy for managing risk—and the economic, environmental, public health, and other existing conditions that exacerbate impacts—before disasters strike. By connecting agencies, priorities, and resources, they help state and local governments move beyond fragmented efforts toward coordinated action to reduce the growing costs and consequences of disasters.

Mathew Sanders leads state-level resilience planning efforts for The Pew Charitable Trusts’ U.S. conservation project.