Designing educational opportunities for the emergency manager of the C21 st

1. Designing educational opportunities for the emergency manager of the C21st Neil Britton and John Lindsay

2. Our key message … • The emergency management profession needs to develop its body of knowledge on sustainable mitigation as well as response/recovery management

3. What will drive emergency management? Key drivers already present within our societies should be directed toward ensuring emergency management is built into routine decision-making. These drivers are: • Sustainable management and community resilience • Holistic management • Good governance and partnerships • Economic efficiency • Heightened risk awareness and shifting priorities

4. What should emergency management be about? • Emergency management should aim to enable communities to maximize gains and minimize losses when dealing with large-scale unanticipated events that pose extreme risks to them

5. How will we achieve it? • Risk-based emergency management • Social and economic focus • ‘Routinizing’ emergency management Emergency management should focus on social and economic goals of communities and, through a risk management approach, balance the costs and benefits of different strategies to achieve those goals. In this way communities can choose acceptable levels of risk about ‘extraordinary’ events that match their needs and circumstances

6. What are likely key tasks for the future emergency manager? • Recognizing resources and risks, and assisting communities choose levels appropriate to their circumstances • Helping to manage communities as sustainable entities • Employing risk management processes for loss reduction • Enhancing long-term equilibrium between human-environmental interactions • Ensuring appropriate emergency response mechanisms are operable • Ensuring long-term recovery factors are linked with community strategic development programs

7. What knowledge will emergency managers need? • Management and organisation studies • Public policy and administration • Risk assessment and risk management • Hazard profiling, assessment and analysis • Community vulnerability profiling • Social marketing and risk communication methods • Land-use planning and management • Emergency response and EOC management • Project management • Long-term community recovery management • Stress management • Field assessment techniques and research methods

8. Are there implications from an international disaster emergency management perspective? • Emergency management needs to reflect the socio-economic parameters it operates within • Educational programs typically ignore these • Context factors/societal perspectives need to be stated explicitly • Context factors are rarely exportable – they are situationally specific • Failure to identify/understand context issues produces unintended consequences when EM programs are imported • ‘Goodness-of-fit’ is an important success factor