Natural disasters don’t knock before entering. They arrive fast, hit hard, and leave communities scrambling for years afterward. From hurricanes tearing through Gulf Coast neighborhoods to wildfires consuming entire California towns overnight, the threat has never felt more real or more urgent than it does right now in 2026.
The question isn’t really “if” the next big natural event will come. It’s “when” – and more importantly, whether your state will be ready when it does. What you might be surprised to find out is just how unevenly prepared different states actually are. Let’s dive in.
The Growing Cost of Doing Nothing
Here’s the thing about disaster recovery: it costs a staggering amount of money after the fact. Think of it like waiting until your car breaks down on the highway before ever checking the oil. In the last five years, FEMA has approved nearly $159 billion in disaster funding, with the vast majority going toward public assistance like debris removal and restoring infrastructure.
As the climate gets hotter, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires are growing more intense, and FEMA is now responding to three to four times more disasters than it did in the 1980s. That’s not a small shift. That is a complete transformation of the disaster landscape across America.
One study from the National Institute of Building Sciences found that federal investment of $27 billion since 1995 to prepare infrastructure for flooding will ultimately save $160 billion. The math is simple: proactive spending saves enormously more than reactive spending. States that understand this are pulling ahead.
The Federal Foundation: What BRIC Built
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The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, known as BRIC, was designed to support states, local communities, tribes, and territories as they undertake hazard mitigation projects, reducing the risks they face from disasters and natural hazards. Honestly, it was one of the more thoughtful federal programs to emerge in recent years.
BRIC distributed $5 billion in grants since it began in 2020, with grants typically paying roughly three-quarters of a project’s cost and giving some projects as much as $50 million. The demand was overwhelming. The program was so popular that FEMA had to reject nearly 2,000 applicants seeking $13 billion in BRIC grants.
The BRIC program aimed to shift the federal focus away from reactive disaster recovery spending and toward research-supported, proactive investment in community resilience. That philosophy represented a genuine shift in how Washington thought about natural hazards. Whether it would last, however, became another story entirely.
A Program Paused: The 2025 Shakeup
What felt like solid federal ground shifted suddenly in 2025. In April 2025, FEMA suspended the BRIC and HMA programs, both of which had funded flood control, wildfire mitigation, and infrastructure resilience projects. For communities mid-project, this was devastating news.
FEMA’s acting Administrator wrote in a memo that the agency would not allocate the $750 million planned for BRIC grants, and would also stop funding projects that were previously approved and still underway. Imagine a hospital halfway through construction simply being told the funding is gone. That’s essentially what happened to some communities.
The administration attempted to end BRIC in April 2025, and as litigation continues, the program is currently paused, with 20 states having sued FEMA for canceling awarded grants. The legal battle playing out in 2026 will have major consequences for preparedness investment across the country.
State Resilience Governance: A Very Uneven Map
Not every state is equally equipped to handle the pressure. In 2024, the American Planning Association created an index for state resilience governance, scoring states from 0 to 10 on the formality of their structures. Only one state received a perfect score, only eight states scored above 5, and a full 20 states received a zero. That last number should worry everyone.
Federal policy now recognizes that preparedness is most effectively owned and managed at the state, local, and even individual level, supported by a competent and efficient federal government. That sounds reasonable in theory. In practice, it places enormous responsibility on states that sometimes have just one person managing emergency operations for an entire county.
Infrastructure and landscape-scale projects that help protect communities from wildfires and floods are largely out of reach for local government budgets, and not every state has the capacity to do all phases of emergency management, including preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation – especially in rural areas where one person might be designated to handle everything.
Virginia and Maine: Leading With Strategy
Some states aren’t waiting around. Virginia, under Governor Glenn Youngkin, appointed the state’s first standalone Chief Resilience Officer and fully staffed its Office of Commonwealth Resilience. Having a dedicated role focused exclusively on resilience sends a clear message about priorities.
In the wake of a trio of severe storm systems over three weeks in the winter of 2023 and 2024, Maine’s governor established the Maine Infrastructure Rebuilding and Resilience Commission by executive order, which then spent a year developing an Infrastructure Resilience Plan. That commission emerged directly from lived experience with disaster.
Maine’s resulting legislation included a $15 million program to help homeowners floodproof basements and strengthen roofs against wind damage, along with a $5.75 million initiative to improve flood models and data-sharing. A $69 million influx from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Resilience Regional Challenge also supports expanded state programs.
Vermont, Rhode Island, and the Power of Planning Documents
Vermont released its inaugural Resilience Implementation Strategy, a specific and prioritized roadmap to resilience, culminating from a 2024 initiative that catalogs current resilience-related work while identifying near- and long-term actions needed. Implementing the full strategy would cost roughly $270 million in one-time funds and around $95 million annually. That’s a real commitment on paper.
Rhode Island enacted a bill to create the Resilient Rhody Infrastructure Fund to support local climate resilience projects, including long-term financing for stormwater mitigation, coastal erosion control, floodproofing, and urban green space. It’s a smart, multi-pronged approach that tackles flooding from multiple angles simultaneously.
I think what stands out about both states is that they’re treating resilience like a long-term investment rather than a one-time emergency response. That mindset shift matters enormously. A plan that lives in a binder is worthless. A plan that’s funded, staffed, and measured is something entirely different.
Connecticut and New Jersey: Embedding Resilience Into Law
Connecticut formed a Severe Weather Mitigation and Resiliency Advisory Council that released recommendations for helping homeowners, renters, and small businesses prepare for disasters. Governor Lamont also signed legislation requiring Connecticut communities to account for disaster risks in local planning and encouraging more resilient transportation infrastructure.
New Jersey finalized updates to land use and development standards to protect communities and ecosystems from growing risks, particularly inland and coastal flooding, with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection expecting to adopt coastal flooding rules that will help officials make better-informed decisions about new development based on flood and sea-level rise risks.
Embedding disaster risk into zoning and development law is honestly one of the smartest long-term moves a state can make. You’re not just hardening existing buildings. You’re preventing vulnerable buildings from ever being constructed in the first place. It’s the difference between treating a symptom and actually preventing the disease.
Florida’s Home-Level Hurricane Defense
Florida takes a different but fascinating approach: going straight to the individual home. For 2025 to 2026, the Florida Legislature allocated $280 million to fund inspections and grants through the My Safe Florida Home program, with the application portal reopening in August 2025. That’s serious money aimed at a very personal level of protection.
The program provides a free wind mitigation home inspection and up to $10,000 for eligible homeowners to fortify their homes against storms, from roof and deck attachments to window upgrades. The $280 million program prioritizes older and low-income residents before opening up applications to the wider public.
It’s a model worth watching. When federal programs face political uncertainty, state-funded home-hardening initiatives offer a resilient alternative that reaches people where they actually live. Roof reinforcements and impact-resistant windows aren’t glamorous infrastructure projects, but they are the difference between a family staying safe and a family losing everything.
Hawaii and Massachusetts: Creative Funding and Measurable Progress
Hawaii is generating climate resilience funding through a “green” tourism tax and expects to raise $100 million annually for projects such as firebreaks, erosion control, and infrastructure upgrades. That is genuinely creative policy. Rather than relying solely on federal grants, Hawaii is essentially asking visitors to help protect the island’s future.
Massachusetts released the ResilientMass Metrics framework to transparently track progress on its resilience plan, and also allotted more than $28 million in action grants to municipalities and regional groups through the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness program. Tracking progress matters as much as making investments, because without measurement, you’re flying blind.
It’s hard to say for sure which state’s approach will prove most effective over the next decade. But what’s clear is that creative, measurable, and funded planning is dramatically better than waiting for Washington to write a check after something terrible has already happened.
Arizona’s Heat Focus: Preparing for Invisible Disasters
Not all natural disasters arrive with wind and water. Some arrive silently, measured only in temperature readings. Arizona took a first-of-its-kind approach to heat safety in the workplace, building on the state’s 2024 Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan. Governor Katie Hobbs’ Executive Order 2025-09 creates a Workplace Heat Safety Task Force to draft heat guidelines for employers, starting in summer 2026.
Heat is increasingly one of the deadliest natural hazards in the United States, yet it often receives far less attention than hurricanes or wildfires. The fact that Arizona is treating it with the same urgency as a flood zone protection plan is genuinely notable, and other hot-weather states would be wise to follow suit.
As the United States braces for a hotter-than-average summer and an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season, state governments are preparing for months of extreme weather ahead while also planning for the disasters of decades to come. Arizona’s heat strategy embodies exactly that kind of long-term thinking, looking beyond the immediate season to the structural vulnerabilities that will only grow over time.
Conclusion: The Gap Between Prepared and Unprepared Is Widening
What this picture reveals is not comforting if you live in one of the 20 states that scored a zero on resilience governance. The challenges, including lack of data, staff capacity, and funding, along with uncertain national policy changes, loom large, but states that are building their own momentum and cultivating in-state resilience expertise are showing real returns on investment.
The states doing this well share a few things in common: dedicated leadership, long-term plans with real funding, and a willingness to embed resilience into the basic laws that govern how communities are built. The states falling behind tend to rely on the federal government to carry most of the weight, which as 2025 demonstrated, can change overnight with a policy memo.
The next big natural event is not a question of imagination. It is a question of timing. And when it comes, the story your state tells will have been written long before the storm makes landfall. What kind of story is yours writing right now?
What do you think? Is your state doing enough to protect its communities? Share your thoughts in the comments.
