Emergency management started in the 1800’s after a fire destroyed a town in New Hampshire. Right now, the only big thing that has happened to FEMA in the past 3 years is the rebuild of its reputation. The major shift in how the emergency management became what it is now is the events of September 11th, 2001. The principles of the federal emergency agency are due to the inadept response to Hurricane Katrina. When 9/11 occurred, the hazard that had occurred changed the risk management approach to deal with the terrorism hazard.
In the future for emergency management, hopefully things will get better. The way that the weather patterns are changing and with global warming occurring, more natural disasters will occur. The leadership, communication and technology will embrace the new challenges and tackle them full on being prepared for everything. Leadership starts with people who are qualified for the position. “emergency management and disaster resiliency were never top priorities in the past for the overwhelming majority of chief executives” (Bullock, Jane A.
. Haddow, George D.. Coppola, Damon P, 2020). The new technology that will be produced should be taught, learned and embraced in the future of this governing body. Social media is slowly becoming bigger and bigger and emergency management is grasping the concept well now, in the future the boom will increase, and emergency mangers need to be ready.
The definition of a stakeholder is a person with an interest or concern in something. A stakeholder is either a group of people or a company that could be directly affected or have effect on an effort.
As a person of power in a community or for the government all stakeholders should be identified and understood because it allows the community to recruit them as part of the effort. A quote from the University of Paris Sud stated that, “\"Stakeholders are critical environmental managers in human-dominated landscapes. In some contexts, stakeholders can be forced to personally act following their own observations and risk perception instead of science recommendation.\" One thing that can help emergency management in the future is the funding for projects and recovery. Federal support has been reduced and the funding comes from a majority of organizations and stakeholders. The stakeholders in this situation are various agencies that volunteer and nonprofit organizations. One thing that is discussed in the textbook is a Mitigation Trust Fund. This fund would be for state and local projects of mitigation. Every year the fund would have appropriate funding and matching for the trust fund to stay active. As far as technology goes, the stakeholders can help fund the new technology needed or if a stakeholder creates the technology needed, they can invest their product into emergency management.
Over the years of Katrina, 9/11, and earthquakes in Puerto Rico, FEMA policies have been revamped. After Katrina, the United States Department of Homeland Security, did a survey of stakeholders and the results concluded that FEMA should improve its support of state, local, and tribal, stake holders along with better federal policies. Policies that are in place by FEMA are restricted and have been becoming more specific to the needs that present themselves. The hard part of emergency management policies is predicting what will happen in a disaster. The Richter Scale shows levels 0-9 for earthquakes. Things can be predicted on what to do for a category 5 earthquake but if for some reason it is goes from a 5 to a 9 in the matter of 10 minutes, there might not be a policy in place for that. This goes into talking about the preparation for the disaster and being prepared for this situation for happen. After a disaster that was not well prepared for, like the events of 9/11, policies change. The textbook states, “federal- and university-based funding dedicated to the advancement of emergency management technology has reached into the billions and is helping to develop even more methods to detect, understand, and treat natural, technological, and most notably, terrorist hazards” (Bullock, Jane A.. Haddow, George D.. Coppola, Damon P, 2020).
Preparedness necessary is for all different types of hazards whether it is diseases, weather, or environmental pollution. There should be policies in place and check lists given to all residents of the suspected disaster area. The new communication system that is sweeping the emergency disaster management field is social media. Instagram, twitter, or Facebook have been utilized in the recent past to communicate to stakeholders and find more resources and organizations for help in recovery. Twitter was used in once case to communicate with stake holders during a crisis through Hurricane Harvey. “Stakeholders are those who can make legal, moral, or presumed claims about an organization (Mitchell et al., 1997)” (Wenlin and Xu, 2019). The future for emergency management communication will be social media based within the next couple of years. A statistic shows 42 government organizations actively used Twitter mentions and hashtags to engage stakeholders during pre, during, and post crisis stages of Hurricane Harvey.
Technology that is being used more and more in this field are smartphones and artificial intelligence. Smartphones are being used to communicate with all the organizations involved with the recovery. Keeping these organization in the loop with updates on the pending and after math of the disaster helps everybody work effectively and close together. Smartphones also allow the use of social media to be used while out in the field. This means emergency managers can post updates faster and even post pictures and different updates. Artificial intelligence is also another thing that can be used in the future. Artificial intelligence is described as a computer program that can determine human behaviors or be able to determine how fast a task can be performed. AI can also determine mathematics the human brain can not process. For the future of emergency management, Ai can be used for training purposes. It can test the way individuals work, serve, evaluate, predict, and simulate incidences. This AI program will improve response time in emergency responders. This future of emergency management can improve reaction time for recovery.
Overall technology and communication are going to be the big changes in the future. Social media is flourishing with the number of stakeholders and organizations that are involved in a recovery plan. When the recovery is occurring, the entire system of AI can be used for reaction type and the process can be faster. Artificial intelligence can also be used for mitigation purposes. Stakeholders will improve the stuff that goes into the funding of projects and efforts for both mitigation and recovery.