2024 Trends in Emergency Management—Leveraging Geographic Information Systems

The evolving role of emergency management reflects the pace of change we see in the world around us. Notably, there has been a dramatic shift in the nature and frequency of acute shocks and long-term stressors impacting communities and organizations nationwide. The climate is changing, severe weather events are more intense, and wildfires are burning hotter. Civil disturbances are more complex, and humanitarian issues like mass migration and the opioid epidemic are long-term crises that demand our attention. And underlying social inequities only serve to increase the vulnerability of some populations to these crises. Overall, the risk to our communities is more systemic and interconnected than ever. In order to effectively prepare for whatever lies ahead, emergency managers need to evolve the way they approach their mission and harness the power of the geographic approach to problem-solving.

This new year promises to be dynamic as the spectrum of threats, hazards, and priorities continues to diversify. Election security, mis- and disinformation campaigns, humanitarian crises, and climate-fueled disasters are just a few of the things we must be ready for. One of the most critical and influential tools we have at our disposal is technology. The increasing complexity of emergencies demands a tech-savvy emergency manager, and it’s nearly impossible for us to do our jobs effectively without robust data analysis and geographic information system (GIS) technology.

In this blog post, we will examine a few strategic ways in which the geographic approach to problem-solving can be applied to the emergency management challenges of 2024. We will delve into topics and trends that emergency managers are currently looking at and explore approaches in leveraging GIS to tackle our most complex community challenges.  

National and Homeland Security—As the US prepares for the 2024 election, emergency managers are turning their focus to polling location safety, cybersecurity threats, mis- and disinformation campaigns, national and homeland security intelligence, and more. For emergency managers, a national election is often treated like a special event, where extensive coordination with law enforcement and intelligence partners leading up to the event is key. Understanding location-specific trends can help predict future activities and inform resource allocation, posturing, and asset protection.

Here are some specific ways ArcGIS can aid your national and homeland security initiatives this year:

• Threat Detection, Intelligence, and Analysis—By using advanced spatial analytics and real-time monitoring capabilities from sources like video surveillance and access control points, GIS can be used to identify trends in activities in and around polling locations. This information should be shared with election officials, law enforcement, and others to ensure adequate situational awareness leading up to November.
• Tactical Team Deployment Management—As election and security staff report to polling places, GIS can monitor the teams’ movements, send communications and tasks in real time, and feed situational awareness information from the field directly into the operations center.
• Event and Physical Security—Real-time monitoring of polling centers, election board headquarters, and political offices is paramount. Not only can GIS monitor activities around facility locations, but ArcGIS Indoors can be used inside buildings for your physical security efforts.

Humanitarian Crises—Since 2021, the US has seen a dramatic increase in mass migration from the southern border, resulting in thousands of individuals being relocated. With each movement, emergency management organizations coordinate with their volunteer counterparts and others to provide transportation, food and water, clothing, temporary housing, and more.

In addition to migration, a rapid increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness has stressed human services sectors all around the country. And the opioid epidemic is taxing each and every one of our public health systems. In these scenarios, emergency managers have often been at the helm of interagency coordination, helping prepare, plan, respond, and recover from these long-term crises.

Using geospatial sciences, ArcGIS helps you better understand the connection between the environment, politics, infrastructure, and people, helping you manage long-term community stressors:

• Homelessness Counts—The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires each Continuum of Care (CoC) community to conduct a Point-in-Time (PIT) count each year during the last 10 days of January. This count of people—sheltered and unsheltered—helps communities understand the extent of homelessness and provides a foundation for social programs and funding. ArcGIS software's Homelessness Point-in-Time Counts solution can be used to conduct point-in-time counts of individuals experiencing homelessness.
• Identifying Opioid Use Trends—ArcGIS can help health districts and law enforcement entities with mapping where drug overdoses are occurring, using data from the medical examiner’s office and the fire department. Through these maps, you can also detect changes over time, comparing this month or quarter with data from the past, helping monitor the progression and spread of drug abuse and movements of dealers. 

The Changing Climate—Climate change impacts are being experienced most dramatically at the intersection of infrastructure, threats and hazards, and society. The communities that feel these impacts the most are those with historically marginalized and underserved populations—which makes hazard mitigation and resilience initiatives even more critical.

Did you know Esri’s ArcGIS is the most widely used platform to manage climate data at all levels of government and in the private sector? By accessing open-source resources like ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, the National Risk Index, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool, emergency management organizations can design risk reduction strategies that are inclusive of the whole community, helping ensure that programs, policies, and strategies equitably target specific locations for more impactful outcomes. In addition to these national resources, ArcGIS can be used to identify specific ways to mitigate risk and minimize the impacts from climate change.  

• Hazard Mitigation Planning—Hazard mitigation requires tools that can assess systemic risk and community vulnerability, design effective policies and risk reduction strategies, and engage the whole community. Mapping and visualizing hazards are only part of the equation. Using GIS to analyze demographic, economic, and climate data helps you assess and understand systemic risk and highlights where to reduce potential impacts of hazards on your critical assets and the people you serve. Additionally, the latest trend of using ArcGIS Hub completely modernizes and digitizes the mitigation planning process, moving it away from a printed PDF document and onto the internet.
• Community Wildfire Protection Planning—These plans provide a comprehensive view of a community’s wildfire risk, pinpoint critical infrastructure, and offer vital information to help determine where mitigation efforts can reduce risk across the landscape. ArcGIS Hub enables stakeholders to identify patterns, assess risks, and prioritize mitigation efforts with greater accuracy and efficiency. By helping streamline these tasks, a community wildfire protection planning template in ArcGIS Hub frees up valuable time and resources that can be redirected toward implementing vital wildfire protection measures.
• Flood Impact Modeling—The Flood Impact Analysis solution can be used to analyze the impact of flooding on critical infrastructure, and share to flood impact maps with internal and external stakeholders. The solution delivers a set of capabilities that helps you develop localized flooding scenarios and visualize the impact of flooding on public infrastructure and critical facilities.

Hazard Analysis for All Critical Lifelines—GIS is a technology that can help emergency managers monitor, maintain, and communicate information related to all critical lifelines, emergency support functions, core capabilities, and mission areas within emergency management. Most organizations use dashboards for situational awareness and maps to highlight critical infrastructure in relation to an active incident. But did you know ArcGIS has solutions and workflows for emergency communications, utilities, public works, health and human services, the environment, and the private sector? It also has solutions for disaster recovery processes like damage assessment and debris management. Just as emergency management has a mission to coordinate and share information with a whole community of partners, GIS is the technology sophisticated enough to manage data and geospatial information across all sectors, in all places.

The examples within this blog post showcase unique, creative approaches for leveraging GIS to solve wicked problems in 2024. For more information on public safety solutions, check out this site to learn how you can leverage GIS within your organization.