organisations and individuals become involved in emergency
00:13
management.
00:15
In this topic, let's carry on with some of the themes we
00:17
reached at the end of that topic and explore the
00:21
evolution of emergency management to what it is today
00:24
and where it's just going.
00:26
From civil defence routes in the Cold War and its focus on
00:29
one single military hazard, we saw an increasing emphasis on
00:34
natural hazards.
00:35
As events occurred around the world that those structures we
00:38
used to respond to, they were found to be effective in
00:42
dealing with response.
00:44
During that period there was also increased knowledge about
00:47
natural hazards in particular.
00:49
There was also increased understanding of human factors
00:52
of emergency management.
00:54
Part of that was the growth or the use of computers--
00:57
the ability to better understand the
00:59
world in which we lived.
01:01
A deeper understanding of the hazards and risks that we
01:03
faced was able to be achieved.
01:06
There was an opportunity to understand that it wasn't just
01:10
being ready to respond to
01:12
emergencies that was important.
01:14
It was understanding the causes of them and the
01:16
opportunities to build resilience into communities
01:19
that began to inform the practise of what we now
01:22
understand today to be emergency management.
01:26
The icon on the screen now was adopted during the 1950s by
01:30
civil defence organisations all around the world.
01:34
It's still often used today in emergency management.
01:38
Although the processes and structures and roles that it
01:41
represents have changed, the basis for it
01:44
for remains the same.
01:46
There's some issues with that because some of the command
01:49
and control, top down, single hazards-based approach of the
01:56
previous civil defence model still has
01:58
some hangovers today.
02:00
At the end of the Cold War in the 1980s and the bringing
02:04
down of the Berlin Wall, we saw an international change in
02:07
approaches to what security was.
02:10
There was more of an emphasis on a broader range of
02:13
community security and safety, moving away from a
02:17
military-focused model to a more holistic and inclusive
02:20
model of what safety was.
02:22
It was also found during the 1960s and '70s, through a
02:26
range of very severe events, that just attempting to
02:30
prepare for them and then responding was costing our
02:34
communities far too much in monetary terms and in
02:38
well-being terms.
02:40
There had to be a better way.
02:42
That better way was seen to be better understanding the risks
02:46
that we faced, working towards reduced the risks, rather than
02:50
just responding to them when they arrived.
02:53
Interestingly, although reliance on technology was
02:56
assisting in better understanding the hazards that
02:59
we faced, that increasing reliance on technology was
03:03
also becoming increasingly apparent to
03:06
be a hazard in itself.
03:08
There were significant events in the 1970s when widespread
03:12
areas in the developed world were without electricity for
03:16
significant periods of time.
03:18
The need to understand the consequences and causes of
03:22
those sorts of hazards meant that emergency management
03:26
began to take an increasingly broader view.
03:29
So that's essentially where emergency
03:31
management is today--
03:32
a more comprehensive and holistic model of emergency
03:36
management, less response-focused and a command
03:40
and control, a more holistic approach which takes in each
03:43
of the four Rs components that we spoke about at the start of
03:47
this course and which we will be exploring in more detail
03:50
throughout the course.
03:51
So into the future.
03:53
It's likely that there will be increasing understanding of
03:56
the risks that we face.
03:58
Within that, though, we will also have increasing
04:01
dependence on technology and the risks that
04:04
that brings with it.
04:05
We're going to talk later in the course about the
04:07
implications of climate change.
04:08
That's something we're having to take seriously today in
04:11
emergency management and is likely to play a larger role
04:14
in the future.
04:16
Resource depletion is said to be one of the issues that is
04:19
going to have to be grappled with in the future.
04:22
With increasing populations and depletion of resources in
04:25
some areas, access to water, in particular, in some parts
04:29
of the world is going to lead to crises.
04:32
Some of those are going to require a comprehensive
04:35
emergency management approach to them.
04:37
Suggestions that we are reaching, at some stage in the
04:40
near future, a peak oil situation where access to
04:43
fossil fuels is going to become less and less
04:46
affordable is something we may need to take into account in
04:50
emergency management.
04:51
So resource depletion may well be something we'll need to
04:54
take into account.
04:55
Larger scale disasters.
04:57
We're going to talk about this more in the course later, but
05:00
increasing exposure to hazards, whether they're
05:02
natural or technological, means that the impacts will be
05:05
larger in the future.
05:06
Therefore, we will need to have more comprehensive and
05:09
effective models to respond to that and to understand them.
05:13
We're seeing an increasing professionalisation of
05:15
emergency management, a need for more people to have a more
05:19
in-depth understanding of what emergency management's about
05:23
or at least the components of that they are responsible for
05:26
working with them.
05:28
We will see emergency management become more of an
05:30
interdisciplinary set of practises, where there'll be
05:33
specialisation within the practise of emergency
05:36
management, but they will need to be relationships between
05:39
those various components.
05:40
There'll be less opportunity for people to be masters of
05:43
all aspects of emergency management, because we're
05:46
going to become broader and broader over time.
05:49
We will see, as we'll talk about later in this course, an
05:52
increasing focus on building community resilience.
05:57
So that's an evolution of emergency management to where
05:59
we are today and where it may be going in the future.
06:02
In the next topic, we're going to look at an example of best
06:04
practise and emergency management
06:06
legislation in New Zealand.