Emergency Response

Major disasters over the past few years required organizations to create comprehensive response plans for managing unprecedented world events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate emergencies.

As the impacts of climate change begin to take hold across the country, emergencies and disasters are unfortunately becoming more common, more severe, and more costly to address. And as the toll of these events increase, both in terms of loss of life and property damage, the outlook is shifting. The public is observing how effectively organizations and agencies respond to these events.

New guidelines and targets are also focusing more attention on emergency response. The United Nation’s Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, focused on a proactive all of society approach to manage and respond to disasters. It was endorsed in Canada in 2015 and is beginning to be embedded in Canadian emergency management legislation, such as in British Columbia. In this environment of heightened awareness and expectation, how can public and private sector organizations best equip themselves to effectively respond to emergencies?

Some organizations that maintain emergency management programs, or risk and resilience branches, may assume they’re well prepared to respond to disaster events.

Unfortunately, the overall capacity within public and private sector emergency management programs has had challenges keeping up with the increasing demands of the current environment. Large communities and private sector entities may have response plans in place, however, for the vast majority of communities and private sector entities, emergency response has not been properly addressed/prioritized and resourced. But when a catastrophic disaster strikes, even large communities and entities can be quickly overwhelmed.

Consider the demands of such recent emergencies as the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, the 2017/2018 wildfires in British Columbia, the 2017 flooding in Quebec, the 2021 wildfires in British Columbia that destroyed the town of Lytton, the Canada wide response to COVID-19 from 2020 onward, the 2021 atmospheric river and subsequent flooding in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, the western heat dome of 2021 that resulted in 676 heat-related deaths in British Columbia and Alberta, and the 2023 wildfires across Canada. The worst in Canadian history with approximately 18.5 million hectares burned (roughly twice the size of Portugal). Those events required massive responses including evacuations, provisional shelters, food distribution, sanitation, communications, infrastructure repair, setting up financial assistance, and other specialized logistical capability.

Disaster response requires procurement expertise, contract management, logistics management capacity, and supply chain coordination – all at once and sustained for weeks, or longer. While a sensible response plan might be achievable on paper, community and even provincial teams are often challenged to scale their personnel quickly and sufficiently when it counts most, and in many cases lack the capacity to do so.

While they know what needs to be done, they may not have enough staff or expertise to handle the full range of resource and logistical issues when incidents do occur. Organizations may be confronted with the challenge of pulling existing staff with minimal experience in emergency management off their typical roles to respond to urgent events. This can affect the quality and sustainability of the response to a disaster and impact the existing lines of effort that staff were pulled away from.

One way the Sendai Framework encourages governments (at the national, regional, and local levels) to build resilience is by taking an all of society mindset to emergency response and building meaningful partnerships across public and private sectors. Partnerships allow entities to bring their strengths to the table and provide a stronger collective response.

From wildfires, tornados and ice storms to outages, cyber attacks, and pandemics – Canadians know anything can happen. As a community or organization leader, take a moment to consider your community or organization’s vulnerability to various disasters and whether you’re prepared to effectively respond when those disasters occur. If you’ve faced a specific disaster in the past, think about the next response. Do you have a team that can support you and stand up your response plan instantly and effectively? Do you have partnerships within your community to support you in mounting a coordinated response?

The disasters that have occurred across Canada over the last decade provide valuable insights for all communities and organizations across the country. They are a reminder to assess their state of readiness and improve their ability to mount an effective response to future emergency events

KPMG in Canada is well positioned to provide community to provincial-scale response support. We can also draw on the experience of our member firms across the globe who have been on the front lines of disasters. We have the experience and bench strength necessary to assist with emergencies large and small, at community, regional, and provincial levels.

KPMG brings value to governments, communities, and business leaders by providing coast to coast emergency management service with a multidisciplinary team of professionals with experience in:

• emergency planning, response, and recovery
• logistics, procurement, supply chain coordination
• risk assessment, finance coordination and advisement.

We can provide both general and specialized surge capacity for public and private sector emergency operations centers. This could involve physically or virtually deployed individuals to support emergency response activities such as advance planning support, situational reporting, planning and activation of group lodging for evacuees, logistics management and supply chain coordination.

Let’s discuss your organization’s state of response readiness, including developing strategies to help you build a trusted team to support your community, and provide you with guaranteed levels of response support.