Disaster recovery demands the same mental capacities that chronic stress can impair.

Research with wildfire survivors shows that long-term recovery can become a “second full-time job.”

Survivors often need help acting on information, not simply more information. AI may ease survivor burden.

Responsible AI should expand access to support, prioritize safety, and strengthen human connection.

After wildfires repeatedly tore through my community in Northern California, I learned that surviving a disaster and recovering from one are two very different things.

The flames eventually go out. Then comes a second disaster: insurance negotiations, temporary housing, rebuilding decisions, financial calculations, endless forms, assistance deadlines, school disruptions, health concerns, and nonstop phone calls and emails.

Life keeps moving while you are trying to figure out how to put yours back together.

As a psychologist, I understood climate trauma intellectually. Living alongside disaster recovery taught me something else. Recovery itself requires an enormous amount of cognitive and emotional capacity. It demands attention, memory, planning, persistence, emotional regulation, and the ability to make consequential decisions and tolerate uncertainty, for months or years.

Yet chronic stress can disrupt those capacities. In my community, we came to call it “fire-brain”: the experience of staring at a relatively simple task and feeling as though your mind simply cannot get traction. Research increasingly supports what survivors have described for years: Disaster-related stress can interfere with executive functioning (Nan et al., 2025).

This creates a cruel mismatch. At precisely the moment people are depleted by loss, grief, displacement, financial strain, and disrupted routines, we ask them to become expert case managers for their own catastrophe. And as climate-related disasters become more frequent and more people enter long,........

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