A growing proportion of the American population is at risk to the effects of wildfires as fire seasons continue to lengthen and intensify. Because of this, it is crucial that states adequately prepare for these powerful fires, along with all other disasters, and their long-term impacts. Long-term disaster recovery is an understudied and misunderstood field, yet much can be gained from current and past work that has identified common crucial problems and limitations in planning for disaster recovery. Across a range of states working with the same hazard, state mitigation plans struggle to consistently define their critical terms and often fail to detail how they will work directly with local communities and governments and address the needs of residents in these communities. As disasters become a progressively larger issue with the consequences of climate change, how states address these issues in their mitigation plans will be essential to minimizing the impacts of disasters on communities throughout the world and providing them with the resources to recover better after a disaster.

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