Comprehensive Resilience Plans Help States Address Long-Term Challenges, Leverage Strengths
South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Maryland take different approaches to meet a common goal
A growing number of states are adopting comprehensive resilience plans to address their long-term disaster risks, and available examples reveal a diversity of approaches to aligning decision-making and investments.
Three states—South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Maryland—have taken strategically different paths to comprehensive resilience planning. Their efforts, which have all delivered beneficial outcomes, highlight the value, common elements, and structural flexibility of these plans.
Why comprehensive planning matters
Comprehensive resilience plans complement and expand on traditional hazard mitigation plans—which focus on individual or localized threats—to tackle the full scope of a state’s risk over time. The approach reflects states’ critical role as intermediaries between federal resilience systems and local implementation. States often determine how federal dollars are spent; invest significant dollars of their own; and shape the standards, data, technical assistance, and policy tools that local governments rely on.
At the same time, most states still lack a deliberate and comprehensive approach to resilience, in part because planning remains fragmented across various agencies: emergency management, environmental policy, water management, housing and community development, and others. Recent state policy discussions have highlighted better resilience planning as a vehicle for addressing cross-sector challenges such as extreme heat, algal blooms, and vector-borne disease, which do not fit neatly within a traditional hazard mitigation frame.
Statewide comprehensive resilience plans help close that gap by creating a shared framework for action across agencies and levels of government. The strongest plans also specifically lay out an implementation strategy. A recent report on state approaches to assessing resilience makes the case that measurement frameworks can help justify investments, demonstrate accountability, support adaptive management, and facilitate interagency coordination—but only if they are deliberately built in at the start of planning processes.
South Carolina: Beyond recovery to durable resilience
South Carolina enacted the Disaster Relief and Resilience Act in 2020 and published its Strategic Statewide Resilience and Risk Reduction Plan three years later. The plan has helped the state establish a broad operating structure for flood resilience and recovery that reaches beyond and complements the state’s existing emergency management programs.
The plan has served not just as a statement of priorities but also as a vehicle for linking statewide strategy to coordination, technical support, and on-the-ground implementation. The state produces annual progress reports, which point to concrete accomplishments, including full staffing of the South Carolina Office of Resilience Watershed Coordination Team across the state’s eight river basins to connect state objectives with basin-level work. The plan has also catalyzed a range of crosscutting tools and initiatives, such as the Resilience Atlas, a shared data and mapping platform; Resilience 101 trainings, which help build planning capacity across communities and agencies; and the Salkehatchie pilot, which tested how watershed-scale planning can turn statewide strategy into place-based action.
Rhode Island: From strategy to project pipeline to capital investment
Rhode Island’s Resilient Rhody program represents a different approach to connecting state resilience objectives with local implementation. The program, which began in 2018 with a statewide strategy first mandated through a 2017 executive order, evolved into an operational system for local engagement, project development and prioritization, and investment planning. The state supported community resilience-building workshops in 38 of its 39 municipalities, giving local governments a structured process for identifying risks and shaping resilience objectives. That work, in turn, helped generate a pipeline of more than 1,600 projects statewide. By 2025, Rhode Island’s approach had matured. The program ultimately evaluated more than 130,000 assets, identified more than 10,000 that were high-risk, narrowed that list to about 40 priority assets, and linked them to potential solutions and financing pathways.
Maryland: Integrating implementation in plan development
Although more recent than South Carolina and Rhode Island’s efforts, Maryland’s statewide work still illustrates the value of a comprehensive approach. In 2022, the state enacted a law creating a state Office of Resilience, and a 2024 executive order defined its core functions. From those foundations, the state crafted its first statewide resilience plan, Resilient Maryland, which establishes a shared definition of resilience, organizes the work across five sectors, and lays out 20 goals and 50 recommendations. It also calls for practical next steps, including development of a statewide resilience baseline and tracker to measure conditions and monitor progress over time, a funding table to better coordinate investments across agencies, a provision of technical assistance for local governments, and integration of resilience principles within local comprehensive plans. Notably, Maryland’s Office of Resilience sits within its emergency management agency, underscoring that resilience planning and hazard mitigation planning can be closely linked institutionally without serving duplicative functions.
Common functions across different models
Although these states have taken different approaches, their experiences point to a consistent set of core functions that define effective statewide resilience plans. Their plans all define resilience consistently across agencies and jurisdictions; align sectors around shared priorities; link risk assessments to investments and actionable projects; and build systems for coordination, data sharing, implementation, and progress measurement.
These common elements suggest that resilience plans are less about a specific format and more about function.
Taken together, these state examples show that no single model is necessary—or appropriate—for statewide resilience planning. Rather, states should design their plans and systems based on their specific needs and risks. South Carolina shows how a plan can build regional coordination and implementation capacity. Rhode Island demonstrates how a statewide strategy can mature into a framework for local support, prioritization, and investment. And Maryland highlights the value of starting with a strong statewide structure.
What unites these efforts is not their format but their purpose: creating a definitive framework that connects risk, priorities, investment, and implementation across agencies and levels of government.
Mathew Sanders leads state-level resilience planning efforts for The Pew Charitable Trusts’ U.S. conservation project.
People
