Volatile. Uncertain. Complex. Chaotic. Ambiguous. Borrowed from Cold War military strategists, the acronym VUCCA captures the Zeitgeist of both higher education and emergency management today—a world of accelerating pace, increasing cognitive load, stressed resources, and relentless change.
This letter responds to Prasad’s editorial on emergency management professionalization, concurring with his call for organizational accountability but refuting the notion that voluntary certification can substitute for licensure. Without licensure, emergency management lacks legal accountability, enforceable ethics, and public protection—key hallmarks of a mature profession.
This study identifies the leadership competencies required for collaborative emergency management, particularly in the context of increasingly frequent compound disasters. The research focuses on how emergency management professionals led collaborations during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, a period marked by overlapping hazards. Based on interviews with 18 state-level emergency management leaders in the South-Atlantic region of the United States, the study identifies six key leadership competencies: flexibility and adaptability; developing, managing, and maintaining relationships; building trust and cohesion through a shared vision and mission; communication and information sharing with stakeholders; coordination with partners; and managing conflict and navigating differences. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for training and education to incorporate these collaborative leadership competencies to prepare emergency management leaders for the challenges of a post-COVID-19 world.
This extensive longitudinal cohort study offers a thorough examination of emergency management education programs, exposing the intricate interactions between variables influencing the experiences, results, and success of instructors and students over time. The study emphasizes the critical need for collaborative, evidence-based solutions to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in the profession by placing the findings within the larger framework of higher education and societal needs. The insights produced inform targeted efforts to recruit and retain diverse faculty and students, create culturally sensitive curricula, and promote inclusive learning environments, which have important implications for policy, practice, and future research. In a field that is essential to creating resilient communities and addressing the intricate problems of the 21st century, this study makes a considerable addition to our understanding and advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The results indicate a maturing of the emergency management education field, with many programs having established track records and reputations. However, certain types of degrees in this field are offered more than others, indicating a trend toward advanced and specialized training and not a valuable entry point into the field or advancing research. The declining optimism about future graduation rates, tempered by the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic on student enrollment and persistence, highlights the need for adaptive and supportive strategies to ensure student success in times of crisis. Additionally, the persistent underrepresentation of minority groups in the emergency management student body, despite some fluctuations and improvements, is a troubling and complex issue that mirrors the lack of diversity in the emergency management profession and higher education more broadly. Furthermore, the decline in full-time tenure-track faculty, particularly at the assistant professor level, and reliance on part-time and adjunct faculty is a troubling trend that may raise concerns about the stability, quality, and research capacity of emergency management programs.
This letter responds to Carlson’s rebuttal of Prasad’s editorial on the professionalization of Emergency Management, continuing and updating the advocacy for certification of the individual, instead of jurisdictional licensing. This letter will refute the notion that only career fields with legal accountability, government-enforceable ethics, and public protection are considered professions.
Emergency management higher education is a critical component of the emergency management enterprise. Since the first degree programs began in the 1980s, significant efforts have been undertaken to develop emergency management higher education to meet the growing and changing needs of practice. These efforts have historically been supported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), specifically the FEMA Higher-Education Program. Recent changes at FEMA have called into question how the agency intends to remain involved in the higher education community. In this moment of uncertainty and change, there is an opportunity for the broader emergency management higher education community to come together and reconsider our shared path forward. The history and current state of emergency management higher education are reviewed, followed by recommendations for the future of emergency management higher education.
Prior to my appointment as Associate Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Director in charge of Preparedness, Training, and Exercises, I had served as Senior Advisor for Intergovernmental Relations for two Arkansas Governors over a 12-year period, 1982-1994, 10 for Governor Clinton and 2 for Governor Tucker. Prior to this, I had served as a University Professor, Chief Deputy State Auditor, Legislative Assistant to a Congressman, Administrative Assistant to a Congresswoman, and Campaign Office Manager for another Congressman. During these times, I had supported a long-time friend who was working on updating the retirement systems for Police and Firefighters in Arkansas, becoming quite familiar with their emphasis on access to training and benefits, as well as related issues. Once I began working with Governor Clinton, I received an assignment to conduct hearings around the state to include Emergency Managers, Fire - fighters, Police, Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs), Mayors, County Executives (we call them County Judges in Arkansas), City Council members, County Quorum Courts, Justices of the Peace (county legislative bodies).
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform our society, with direct impacts on the field of emergency management. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into educational institutions, scholars have expressed concerns regarding the ethical and educational implications of AI usage in higher education. This impact and use of AI will have tremendous implications for the scholarship of teaching and learning and the core competencies of the emergency management profession. This study argues that, within the discipline of emergency management, a lesser-used but valuable metric for academic AI guidance can be found in the policies of the most revered journal publications in the field. This study provides a snapshot of how journal publications in emergency management currently approach AI usage with regard to authorship, peer review, and the editorial process. This study presents a cross-sectional analysis of 108 emergency management journals across multiple databases, identifying 71 journals with publicly available AI guidelines for authors, reviewers, or editors. For potential authors, our qualitative thematic findings reveal consensus support for AI use in proofreading and moderate support for use in statistical analysis. There is moderate support for the use of generative AI/large language models (LLMs) in passage creation, and low support for image/figure creation; however, both require full disclosure and accountability when used. There was a unanimous stance against granting authorship or coauthorship to AI. Guidelines for reviewers show strong opposition against using AI, especially LLMs, due to confidentiality and privacy concerns. Likewise, editors are mostly banned from using LLMs, unless they are used only for identifying potential reviewers or provided with an in-house publisher-owned AI tool. Our study concludes with a discussion on the contradictory nature of existing guidelines and pedagogical advice to current and future instructors in emergency management.
Employing principles of Interior Design Theory and Practice, this paper investigates the relationship between public safety and human security, underscoring the essential role of design thinking as a fundamental intellectual framework for both curriculum development and instructional methodologies in these domains. Through the application of a design-oriented methodology-characterized by creativity, empathy, and a systematic approach to problem-solving, this study seeks to contribute to the evolving body of knowledge regarding effective pedagogical strategies for the public safety curriculum. By fostering an environment that prioritizes innovative thinking and human-centric solutions, this research aims to illuminate pathways for enhancing educational practices in the context of public safety.
The need for more qualified liaison officers serving in a variety of emergency response roles from various critical emergency management (EM), law enforcement, and first response organizations is at an all-time high due to the variety of significant national disasters and emergencies our country endures. Moreover, having more qualified and accessible liaison officers would act as a "force multiplier" when serving our communities devastated by a hurricane, wildfire, ice storm, or a man-made tragic event, such as an active shooting situation. To that end, more qualified personnel from all parts of the country, world, and from various EM/response organizations would help expedite the emergency response and management function of a major incident, and most significantly, serve the devastated area more efficiently and effectively to not only limit the number of deaths but to minimize the cost of the overall destruction. Even if one life can be saved from this current research study, and it leads to finding ways to get more personnel the necessary training and qualification, then every second spent on the research was well worth it.
Preparing students for the increasingly complex emergency management profession necessitates fostering interpersonal and higher-order thinking skills, alongside adaptability to navigate ethical situations. Embedding experiential learning opportunities into course design is one option to link theoretical and practical skills in shared decision-making. This longitudinal study focuses on the design and implementation of a tabletop exercise to integrate high-efficacy strategies by challenging students with ethical decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. This study extends the emergency management literature by asking the following: How did the embedded instructional design elements influence the ethical dilemma discussions? An analysis of data collected over three semesters resulted in three dominant themes: public health mandates versus individual freedoms; authority versus consensus building; and bureaucratic resistance and political pressures. The manuscript concludes with recommendations based on lessons learned and suggestions for future research.
The papers assembled in this special issue mark something more consequential than a periodic stocktaking of emergency management higher education. Read together, they describe a discipline standing at a genuine inflection point one where the foundational scaffolding that has supported emergency management as an academic enterprise is being stress-tested simultaneously by federal institutional turbulence, by the epistemic disruption of generative artificial intelligence, and by a hazard environment whose complexity now routinely outstrips our pedagogical and theoretical inheritance.
INTRODUCTION:Organizing communication among paramedics during natural and human-caused disasters is vital for reducing the impact and ensuring efficient relief efforts. This study examined the communication competency of paramedics during disasters, focusing on current challenges and solutions. METHODS:This research was conducted as a systematic review by searching the databases Google Scholar, Science Direct, ISI Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, Ovid, Pro Quest, and Wiley using the keywords "Communication," "Competence," "Paramedic," "Emergency," and "Disaster" in combination with the Boolean operators OR and AND. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines were used for the systematic search, and the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme was used for quality assessment of the final extracted articles. RESULTS:A total of 1,511 articles were reviewed, resulting in 13 articles selected for the final analysis. The review indicated that studies from various countries focused on the communication competency of paramedics during disasters, specifically in three areas: communication with victims, interaction with rescue teams at the scene, and collaboration with other medical colleagues. CONCLUSION:Most studies examining the enhancement of communication competency among paramedic personnel underscore the importance of comprehensive training programs. These programs should focus on active listening skills and proficient written communication to ensure unambiguous information exchange, particularly in critical situations such as disasters. Furthermore, the implementation of diverse pedagogical strategies, including operational exercises and high-fidelity simulations, is recommended to improve communication proficiencies, thereby preparing paramedic personnel to implement timely and appropriate responses to disasters.
The management of emergencies and disasters depends, in part, upon the synergy between academic researchers and practitioners. This paper considers the historical roots of the divide between these groups and situates the research-practitioner divide within the growing complexity of disasters, as well as the theoretical foundations that support collaborative synergies that can lead to meaningful research and partnership opportunities. For academic researchers, the goals of higher education, tenure and promotion structures and incentives, and the complexities of regulatory requirements can inhibit the development of sustained partnerships with practitioners. For practitioners, engagement with academic researchers can be constrained by organizational demands, mission, and leadership priorities, and compliance with legal standards and regulations. Despite these constraints, shifts in perspectives on the value of research and expectations for research create new opportunities to close the divide between academic researchers and practitioners. This paper argues that communities of practice, composed of practitioners, boundary-spanning professionals, and academic researchers, offer a pathway for fostering collaboration and research synergy in the emergency management discipline.
The essential recommendation of this paper is that vulnerability management should become the primary, quintessential subdiscipline within the study and application of emergency management. This paper, steeped in the premise that emergency management still learns from public administration, makes connections on how public management became-and may continue as-the primary and quintessential subdiscipline for the major discipline of public administration. Moreover, the reader realizes how public management and public administration coexist, with the same said about vulnerability management and emergency management in relation to each other. For instance, characteristics of vulnerability management are tied together with foundational principles of emergency management to justify vulnerability management's coexistence as a quintessential subdiscipline of emergency management-not as a replacement for the emergency management discipline but as a valid, logical, integrative, and holistic paradigmatic expansion that helps scholars and practitioners better know what and how emergency management activities, strategies, and tactics assist them with all aspects of disasters and catastrophes. The latter is even more true when vulnerability management's focus is on averting disasters before they occur. Finally, a major recommendation and a conclusion that tie the paper together demonstrate why vulnerability management is a quintessential subdiscipline that supports emergency management, just as has been the case, to date and likely into the future, with public management in support of public administration.
Public information officers (PIOs) are responsible for collecting, analyzing, verifying, and communicating risk, crisis, and recovery information to a wide variety of people across the "whole community." Along with the challenges inherent in fulfilling their responsibilities, PIOs now have a new emerging constraint-an enhanced lack of time. The rise, and now arguably dominance, of social media has created the necessity for PIOs to respond to crises in ever shorter amounts of time. An incident that historically a PIO could respond to in an hour must now be addressed within a matter of minutes. The purpose of this exploratory study was to measure to what extent there was consensus among PIOs regarding their perspective of the ideal capability targets for specific emergency communication tasks after notification of an incident. This was a limited study. The findings from this study could be used as a call for regional or nationwide research to develop more robust data. Ultimately, this wider dataset may be used to propose standard capability targets that PIOs can use to develop and measure their own capability targets based on crisis communication plans.
Can scholarship truly advance knowledge if readers struggle to use it? In emergency management (EM) research, rigor is essential, yet reliability and credibility do not guarantee impact. This paper examines the persistent tension between rigor and readability and argues that integrating them is necessary to produce evidence practitioners can understand, trust, and apply. Drawing on international literature and author-practitioner experience, we situate this challenge within broader knowledge mobilization discourse and advance practical strategies to strengthen uptake. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 reinforces this imperative, calling for evidence that is accessible and actionable. With 4 years remaining in its implementation period, EM scholarship must move beyond privileging citations and journal prestige toward demonstrating real-world value. This paper translates that mandate into a role-specific call to action. When rigor and readability are balanced, evidence shifts from static knowledge to guidance-driving policy, informing practice, and equipping practitioners to navigate increasingly complex risk environments.
The practitioner-academic gap in the emergency management and disaster research space has been much discussed. Enrico Quarantelli, a pillar in the field of disaster research, in his paper Converting Disaster Scholarship into Effective Disaster Planning and Managing, remarked about his desire to see more practical implications for his work. The paper, published in 1993, was written during a time when few emergency management degree programs existed (save for, in 1994, the University of North Texas, Thomas Edison State College, and Rochester Institute of Technology) and before the modern homeland security era helped establish such stalwarts as the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, and others. Much has changed since then in the way of academic/practitioner collaboration and in bridging the gap between higher education and practice. According to the 2023 Federal Emergency Management Agency Higher Education State of the Community: Annual Survey and Report, there are approximately 126 higher-education emergency management-related programs (with an estimated 88,000 graduates), and an expectation from 70 percent of the programs that responded to the 2023 annual survey that they will see an increase in enrollment over the next 3 years. Simultaneously, there has been an explosion in pure emergency management organizations (and also responsibilities) and so-called "pracademics." But the struggle continues. In this essay, the history of the practitioner-higher-education divide will be reviewed, followed by a discussion of modern challenges and perceived best practices, which the authors feel will help assist the field moving forward.
Computer simulation modeling provides significant value in enhancing emergency preparedness policies for schools, businesses, and outdoor events. This is especially true for complex and unpredictable events like active shooter scenarios, which are difficult to physically replicate due to their diversity in terms of circumstances, venues, and challenges. Active shooter events can occur under various circumstances and take place in a wide range of venues including schools, offices, and outdoor events and create a wide range of unique challenges. According to a 2017 study, 15 percent of human-caused mass casualty incidents with over 10 fatalities are mass shootings. Therefore, our work focused on adding injury type, blood loss related to the function of placement of gunshot wounds, and time lapse from injury. These additional parameters significantly improve active shooter event simulation and changes the paradigm established by currently available simulations where the victims are either "killed" or "unaffected." This traditional binary approach is unsuitable when the timeliness of interventions is of concern and does not help improve emergency preparedness and emergency response protocols. In a previous work, the authors demonstrated how simulating physiological decline can be quantified, improve realism, and lead to response protocol improvement. The current work proposes a model for simulated mitigation of gunshot wound injuries, which complements the previously presented exsanguination model. To simulate injury and blood loss mitigation, a number of data sources were consulted to quantify the blood outflow and how it can be limited by different measures, as well as the time required to apply them and their individual effectiveness. This work summarizes the findings and provides a practical guide for implementation. In an additional work, the authors provide a reference implementation in a software library for AnyLogic®. That research focused on the simulation of the initial injury, its mitigation, and the time for critical care transport during the proverbial golden hour of trauma. The human body is complex; the circulatory system alone has several compensatory mechanisms and a wide range of variability in every organism. In addition, the way it responds to coagulating agents and other blood loss control techniques may vary between different organisms and humans. In this work, the authors focus on the primary effectors of those variables and introduce a limited set of mitigations for a relatively short-term simulation. While the model is imperfect, it creates a common ground for further simulation work where different researchers can converge on a known unified deterministic model, allowing them to control that variable while testing hypotheses about other parts of the emergency response. Furthermore, by increasing fidelity, this model can help assess the effects of bystander volunteer hemorrhage control, medical first response, and critical care transport times.
The critical importance of access to water has been recognized both nationally and internationally. In the United States, the National Infrastructure Protection Plan and other planning documents highlight the potentially dire public health implications of impacts on public water systems. According to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, safe and reliable potable water supplies are at risk due to climate change, flooding, drought, and sea level rise, and such risks are expected to increase going forward. Internationally, the Sustainable Development Goals include ensuring availability and sustainability of water and sanitation. Despite this fact, acute shocks and long-term stressors may cause contamination or otherwise limit access to safe drinking water. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's Community Lifelines approach encompasses access to water and other necessities, and requires emergency managers to take a whole-community approach to response and recovery. However, preparedness and mitigation efforts have not historically taken this same approach. Recent water crises, such as the ones in Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi, have shown a disconnect between water system managers and emergency managers. Inclusive emergency management demands consideration of both current and future needs, and consideration of Community Lifelines, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the adverse event. The recent saltwater intrusion threat along the lower Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana has provided yet another example of vulnerability in the drinking water sector and the intersection of emergency management and public health.
