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Emergency management is guided by core principles that ensure communities can prepare for, respond to and recover from crises, and build long-term disaster resilience. At the heart of resilience is effective emergency planning, which drastically reduces both the likelihood and consequences of an incident.
In our latest article, we break down the eight foundational principles of emergency management, look at how they apply in practice and explore the emergency management software capabilities needed to operationalize these principles across your organization.
What is emergency management planning?
Emergency management planning is a collaborative and strategic process through which individuals, organizations and agencies come to documented agreements to address their emergency preparedness, response and recovery needs. This planning effort ensures a coordinated approach to managing risks and mitigating the consequences of potential emergencies.
The process typically begins with a comprehensive risk management study. During this critical phase, stakeholders align to better understand the specific needs, dynamics and resources of the community or organization for which the emergency plan is being developed.
To ensure the plan is both robust and actionable, emergency management professionals often rely on a core set of principles of emergency planning and management. These principles help maintain a results-focused approach, such that the plan can cover a wide range of scenarios and contingencies that could arise during a disaster.
Adherence to these emergency management principles is essential for the efficiency and effectiveness of emergency response and recovery operations.
Why do emergency management principles matter?
A principles-based approach to emergency management planning offers a flexible and adaptive framework for preparing for, responding to and recovering from a wide variety of threats and disruptions. Unlike rigid, prescriptive plans that cover every possible scenario, the principles-based approach emphasizes a set of core precepts that guide decision-making under uncertain and rapidly evolving conditions.
This flexibility is critical in real-world disaster situations, where circumstances can shift quickly, and predetermined checklists may no longer apply. By grounding emergency planning in high-level principles, organizations are empowered to respond creatively and effectively – even amid the unpredictability of crisis events.
The eight principles of emergency management
The eight planning principles of emergency management include:
1. Informed by risk: This foundational principle of emergency management holds that planning starts with risk. When protocols are risk-driven, they're built on real risk analyses and prioritize impacts most likely to occur, or most likely to cause severe damage if they do.
2. Reduces unknowns: Sound planning narrows the unknowns. It builds an organization's understanding of risks, vulnerabilities and treatment options across the social, built, economic and natural environment. This covers who's responsible for response and recovery, and who's most likely to be affected.
3. Collaborative and inclusive: No plan works in isolation. Emergency planning depends on consultation and engagement across every stakeholder a disaster could touch, including government agencies, organizations and individuals alike, and on the relationships emergency managers build and maintain with each of them.
4. Strategic: Planning is inherently strategic, building the objectives, relationships and networks that strengthen every phase of emergency management, from preparedness through recovery.
5. Solutions oriented: Effective plans are solutions oriented, translating risk analysis into agreed approaches for managing consequences. Because certain risks are unique to certain communities, those risks should be prioritized ahead of less likely events.
6. Iterative and informed: Planning improves with each cycle. Lessons from one stage inform the next, reinforcing a mindset that favors preparation and advance planning, the kind that lets emergency managers anticipate disasters and build resilient communities before a crisis hits.
7. Builds adaptive capacity: No protocol survives contact with a real disaster unchanged. Planning builds adaptive capacity by creating frameworks flexible enough to be reshaped on the fly, giving response teams room for creativity when the unexpected happens.
8. Shares responsibility: Responsibility is shared, not centralized. Emergency plans document the actions expected of a wide range of people and entities. It's not enough to simply work together; each group has to execute its own part effectively.
Why plan for emergencies at all?
These emergency management planning principles aren't just theoretical; they have real-world implications. So, it's imperative that these principles are heeded to ensure that emergency plans are effective, inclusive and adaptable.
But this raises a fundamental question, why plan for emergencies at all?
Scientific evidence increasingly points to a future where natural hazards are more frequent, more severe and less predictable. According to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a more volatile climate is expected to increase the:
- Number of days with extreme fire weather
- Frequency and intensity of droughts
- Overall volatility of weather-related hazards
For countries like Australia, these projections have serious economic and social implications. Recent modelling suggests that the economic cost of disasters to Australian communities could rise to an average of AU$39 billion annually by 2050.
Applying the principles in practice
To build disaster resilience, organizations apply the principles of emergency management by acting decisively and coordinating effort across every team involved. Emergency planning is what turns that priority into practice.
What can organizations do? They can start by:
- Identifying the range of stakeholders with planning responsibilities
- Connecting planning stakeholders
- Assisting people to understand the risks in their entity
- Facilitating information sharing about risks
- Ensuring people know the actions to be taken across the phases of prevention, preparedness, response and recovery
Taking such effective emergency planning actions contributes to reducing the impact of disaster, establishing a stronger basis for recovery and enhancing resilience.
Role of emergency management software
Emergency management software helps put these planning and resilience principles into practice by streamlining incident response using best practice all-hazard incident management standards from around the world, including AIIMS, NIMS / ICS and JESIP.
Key emergency management software capabilities include:
- Situational awareness: Create a common operating picture to maintain situational awareness via field personnel updates, GIS feeds, data import, email and social media. Display critical information on comprehensive dashboards and incorporate external data feeds from across the web.
- Emergency operation center management: Stand up EOCs at local, regional, state and national levels. Wrap up multiple related local incidents into a single regional one. Provide interfaces fully tailored to the role and level of the user.
- Team activation, roles and collaboration: Synchronize and align your emergency response efforts with team activation notifications, defined roles and responsibilities and a centralized location to collaborate, share information and record event critical information.
- Mapping: Incorporate Esri ArcGIS, WMS, KML, GeoJSON or other sources to view asset locations in the context of weather threats and critical infrastructure protection. Update feature layers on your own ArcGIS server with system data.
- Emergency messaging: Communicate crucial information easily, whether via email, SMS, voice message, push notifications or within the app itself. Emergency messaging lets you include automated response links for requests for assistance that workflows follow up on.
- Response plans and checklists: Request, activate and automate response plans and checklists to help ensure your response teams are following the same playbook. Use best-practice templates or design your own, with each step assignable and rolled up for easy progress tracking during an incident.
Conclusion
The eight principles of emergency management provide a foundation for organizations and jurisdictions to develop the capability necessary to effectively prepare for and manage severe to catastrophic disasters. These key emergency management concepts drive proactive planning which in turn helps ensure resilience.
The best part is emergency management teams don't have to implement these emergency principles alone. They can partner with emergency management software providers like Noggin to obtain all the information and tools needed to manage any incident effectively through its entire lifecycle.
But don't just take our word for it. Request a demo and try Noggin for yourself.
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