Emergency management planning

Recent headlines have been dominated by emergency events. Flooding devastation, record heatwaves, looming hurricanes, and a warming ocean suggest more frequent and more severe emergencies await us in the near future.

Thankfully, forward-thinking public and private sector organizations have plans and strategies in place to get ahead of emergency events. Many have departments or personnel assigned to the task. Most have binders full of documentation, key contacts, and detailed procedures to help them respond quickly. However, as emergency events intensify and regulatory frameworks evolve, provincial agencies, Indigenous governments, and municipalities are facing entirely different circumstances than those from the recent past.

To ensure readiness, organizations across the public and private sectors should consider assessing and improving the quality of their plans, strategies, and standard operating procedures.

It is essential to have plans and standard operating procedures that emergency managers and executives can count on when they need it most. If these products are not useful when the time comes, uncertainty will remain about a government or organizations readiness and response and recovery efforts can become more challenging, more complex, more costly, and most important of all, can lead to greater impacts on the people and places they are supposed to support. Useful plans are designed to suit the unique needs of the organization and its personnel. They are tested and validated, and should be constantly improved and refined over time.

The unprecedented wildfire season of 2023 tested the readiness of many jurisdictions and communities across Canada, forcing binders off of shelves to support emergency management activities. These events provided valuable insights, enabling emergency management professionals to better understand the types of products and contents that are and are not useful in critical situations. Organizations that were forced to test the value of their plans and strategies now have an opportunity to leverage these experiences and insights to modernize their planning products.  They can turn these events into an opportunity to be better prepared for the next emergency through actionable plans and strategies that will result in a more effective response.

Focusing on your emergency management program and products this way might seem obvious, but organizations often lack capacity and resources to both reflect upon events and make changes based on those learnings. Regardless, organizations need to determine how mature their emergency programs are, including all the documentation that supports them. They also need to identify which phases and functions need particular attention to achieve greater capabilities, capacity, and a higher level of readiness. For instance:

• Are the necessary plans, personnel, and tools in place to support your entire emergency operation centre to respond effectively to all high-risk events?
• Have all response and recovery functions been thoroughly considered, and do you have the right personnel to take on those responsibilities?
• Do your standard operating procedures clearly define who is responsible for the various types of decisions, and have these procedures been tested across a variety of scenarios?
• Do your plans consider the need for surge capacity? Can you quickly stand up and sustain your emergency operations centre, even when key staff are unavailable, or when they have become overwhelmed during a catastrophic emergency?

Emergency management practitioners have the difficult role of needing to anticipate challenging events and confront them in a targeted and deliberate way. In some cases, this is driven by a recent event – in other cases, it’s seeing neighbours and other jurisdictions go through an emergency of their own. Either way, being resilient to our changing world requires emergency management organizations to objectively assess their current level of readiness and diligently focus on continuous improvement and a higher state of readiness. It means developing flexible plans that are actionable across a wide range of hazards and are practical in the modern world.

Advances in emergency management products are being driven by the increased frequency and complexity of emergencies. They are also a function of new emergency management standards and policy frameworks that are emerging. Jurisdictions around the world and across Canada are looking to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, advanced by the United Nations (UN), as a guiding model. It shifts the mindset around emergency management planning by placing more emphasis on risk management and reduction, rather than focusing primarily on response measures.

The Province of British Columbia (BC), for instance, has adopted the Sendai Framework with the Emergency and Disaster Management Act which was introduced in fall 2023. Emergency Management Ontario is currently reviewing their emergency management program and legislation.

Organizations therefore need to align their emergency management strategies with a range of leading practices, governmental policy frameworks, and increasingly sophisticated national and international emergency planning standards (e.g., Canada’s CSA Z1600). In the months and years ahead, for instance, local authorities and critical infrastructure asset owners may need to meet higher standards of collaboration with other emergency management partners, modernize their emergency management plans, and test their emergency management capabilities.

Do you have confidence in your current risk assessments, your strategies, and your response plans and standard operating procedures? Are they updated? Do you feel certain that the personnel you will be relying on are ready and accessible to activate and sustain your response efforts? Are you prepared to manage complex recovery management activities? Are you sure?

Our cross-disciplinary team works with public and private sector agencies and organizations, supporting their emergency management programs. We know how the emergency management landscape is changing, understand how planning demands are evolving and intensifying, and recognize the planning challenges facing organizations today.

Our top priority is to bring a high state of readiness and sophistication to your locality or organization to reduce risk and increase your capabilities across the phases of emergency management. That means leading practice plans and strategies that are actionable. Our trusted team brings experience from across the country and around the world to help you navigate our changing disaster landscape.