Kristi Rollwagen, an instructor in the Master of Science in Emergency and Disaster Management program at the University of St. Thomas, wrote an op-ed for MinnPost examining how the field of emergency management must evolve to address increasingly complex and interconnected crises. She argues that emergency managers should embrace strategic foresight, cross-sector collaboration and emerging technologies to better prepare communities for future disasters.
From the op-ed:
The future of emergency management will not be just filling in another X on your emergency management bingo card even though many emergency management practitioners have felt like that is all that they have done for the past few years. Whether it has been a slow and steady drip or a large tidal wave, the landscape in which emergency managers have operated has dramatically shifted over the last five years.
New squares on the emergency management bingo card have been added in the past five years to include a global pandemic, civil unrest, the arrival of noncitizen migrants and the subsequent immigration raids, assassination attempts on elected officials, school shootings, a global network outage and climate impacts.
Emergency managers can no longer afford to prepare only for the disasters they have already seen. They must think of the unthinkable and then prepare for it. Emergency managers are now expected to combat viral misinformation campaigns while simultaneously coordinating shelter operations, cyber disruptions and politically charged public messaging.
