Charting a Course for Emergency Management: Insights from the Literature, 2020–2023

Study Background and Purpose

The field of emergency management is changing rapidly. Emergency managers are being asked to carry out new missions—in particular, public health preparedness and response (as shown during the coronavirus disease 2019 [COVID-19] pandemic) and the management of consequences from increasingly frequent and severe weather events. As a result, and based on the insight that many emergency management approaches apply across all types of disasters, the field is moving toward an expanded all-hazards approach.

As one step toward understanding these changes and charting a path forward for emergency management, this study assesses the current state of thinking about the field. The study has three objectives:

• Identify the most frequently discussed issues in emergency management.
• Compare issues highlighted in emergency management research with those highlighted in practice.
• Examine how these issues are affecting the identity, role, and evolving needs of the emergency management enterprise (beyond formal emergency management organizations) now and into the future.

Ideally, this study will serve as a pilot for a regular review of current issues in the emergency management field. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA's) National Disaster and Emergency Management University is the project sponsor, the findings and recommendations are aimed at the wider field, including state, local, tribal, and territorial governments (SLTTs), nonprofits, researchers, educators, and the private sector.

Approach

To accomplish these tasks, we analyzed news articles, peer-reviewed research literature, after-action reports (AARs), conference agendas, and congressional documents. Our approach focused on identifying issues (sometimes called “topics”) from the last few years, with the research literature extending back to 2020 and news articles extending back to 2022.

Key Findings and Recommendations

Finding 1: Our review of prior efforts to build consensus in the field shows that there is an opportunity for broader and more sustained practitioner input into the emergency management research agenda.

Recommendation 1: Develop a network of researchers, educators, emergency managers, and policy practitioners that is active over multiple years. This long-term network should provide input into priorities for research, build consensus around key terms and ideas, and identify areas of divergence for future discussion.

Finding 2: Preparedness and response are discussed more frequently than mitigation and recovery across all source types. Much of the funding and activity in emergency management practice concerns mitigation and especially recovery, but written analysis addressed these topics less often in our sample of the literature. This may be because preparing to respond and responding are closer in time to the attention-grabbing acute crisis phase of an event. There is an opportunity to reduce disaster losses and overall cost through improved mitigation and recovery strategies, especially if they are linked to a holistic understanding of disaster risk.

Recommendation 2: If this finding holds up over a longer period of analysis, develop research programs to increase the knowledge of mitigation and recovery in reducing disaster risk. These programs should have an interdisciplinary focus to encourage collaborative efforts among researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and community members, especially if public attention and research pays less attention to these topics. New programs could identify emergency managers' specific roles in improving mitigation and recovery.

Finding 3: Infectious disease was the most frequently mentioned hazard during the 2020–2023 period, but other climate-related slow-onset events including drought may be understudied. For example, only six journal articles in our sample focused on drought, even though it is the hazard type that affects the greatest number of people worldwide (Emergency Event Database, undated) and is the fourth most common trigger of billion-dollar disasters in the United States (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2023).

Recommendation 3: Devote resources and attention to studying the mechanisms behind slow-onset events. Given the impact and importance of drought, both in the United States and globally, there is a potential gap in the understanding of slow-onset events hazard-focused research. This observation suggests the potential to improve emergency management's understanding of its potential impact in slow-onset events, including events related to climate change. Historians and social and environmental scientists who study events over long periods of time may be able to contribute to conversations relevant to emergency management across disciplines in these areas (Knowles, 2020).

Finding 4: AARs and conferences mention climate resilience in natural hazards contexts more than other sources. This tendency reflects practitioner interest in individual disasters and their direct effects on people.

Recommendation 4: Revitalize AARs and conferences by linking specific hazards and disasters to broader trends in risk and societal resilience. One approach would be to use Whole Community Climate Resilience as a framework for AARs. This approach emphasizes systems-based, community-wide investments in climate adaptation (Federal Emergency Management Agency, undated). In one specific example, FEMA's Office of Equal Rights examined how partnerships among governments, nonprofits, and underserved groups could improve equity (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2022, p. 5).

Finding 5: Communication was the only policy problem discussed in every AAR analyzed.

Recommendation 5: Identify structured ways to analyze the causes of communication breakdowns and related recommendations across AARs.

Finding 6: The phrase “lessons learned” is commonly used in AARs, but rarely defined and inconsistently applied.

Recommendation 6: To increase both understanding of AARs and their potential internal and external impact within the emergency management enterprise, provide systematic guidance for how to most effectively conduct and structure an ARR in the emergency management field. This guidance should provide definitions and potential applications for common phrases such as “lessons learned,” “best practices,” and “recommendations.”

Finding 7: Climate resilience is discussed in more uncertain terms among our sources than are other FEMA strategic plan objectives. It may be that the topic of climate resilience and the consequences for disaster risk are not well articulated or understood.

Recommendation 7: Recognize the uncertainty in climate resilience discussions; and provide guidance for emergency managers and their stakeholders to understand what climate resilience means for them, how uncertainty should be considered, and what they can to do build resilience in their limited sphere of influence.

Finding 8: Topic modeling shows that some FEMA strategic plan objectives are associated with specific topics in our sources.

Recommendation 8: Use frequently mentioned topics associated with each objective as the starting point for conversations about how to achieve an objective. The connectedness of objectives can also be considered using this topic modeling. For example, FEMA could hold a workshop or develop guidance on heatwaves, both in terms of building climate resilience and ensuring equity among impacted populations.

Finding 9: Empirical methods were used in roughly half of the scholarly sources.

Recommendation 9: Build the empirical base for emergency management knowledge and identify opportunities to use new methods that lead to replicable and rigorous scientific findings. Also explore ways to use empirical methods in challenging and fast-changing environments, such as rapid deployment to a community post-disaster.

Finding 10: Global security trends reflect increasing focus on climate, environment, and health threats from 2021 to 2023.

Recommendation 10: The emergency management community should reflect on global trends and consider what they could mean for emergency management in the United States. Trend reports can also aid in building broader awareness of individual hazard events, which tend to drive discourse within the practitioner literature. Trend analysis can also highlight the potential for different threats to combine to produce new dangers. For example, the combined threats posed by climate change and migration together or artificial intelligence and synthetic biology together are beyond those posed by each threat alone.

Concluding Observation

The expanding scope and scale of emergencies creates urgency for emergency management to develop as an area of research and as a profession. The findings and recommendations in this study are intended to foster thought leadership and a research agenda to support this development. Implementing these recommendations will require commitment from emergency management institutions to work together to strengthen the field across its disparate parts. We hope that this study will stimulate such action.