The Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t claim to know, but it’s gone a long way towards making an educated guess. FEMA's recent report, Crisis Response and Disaster Resilience 2030: Forging Strategic Action in an Age of Uncertainty is a thoughtful speculation about where emergency planning is headed in the next couple of decades.

Starting with FEMA’s Strategic Foresight Initiative and continuing through to exercises which considered possible future scenarios, the report is the result of an interactive process designed to get the widest range of stakeholders to give our future a good hard look.

The many activities of the SFI—workshops, webinars, and other outreach—helped FEMA identify nine “drivers” of change. The drivers range from seemingly upbeat items, such as universal access to information, the changing role of the individual, and technological innovation and dependency, to potential negatives, such as decreasing government budgets, terrorist threats, and climate change.

While the drivers helped the agency think about possible futures, the key to the SFI approach is realizing that any of those drivers could lead us to places not quite imagined. It’s what Director David Kaufman of FEMA's Office of Policy and Program Analysis calls a combination of foresight and prediction.

“While the two terms seem similar, a key difference between the two is that foresight acknowledges the fact that the future is uncertain, and tries to prepare decision makers for how the future may change,” he wrote in a July blog post. “Predictions are an attempt to remove uncertainty from the future. Emergency managers must attempt to foresee what possible futures they may face when they make decisions that will have implications for years down the road.”

In the big picture, the report finds that emergency managers are likely to face more and more complicated disasters, while being less certain of operational frameworks and available resources. But those constraints could give rise to new types of individual and private-sector emergency actors, and working together globally and locally might become new norms. Of course, these developments would require increased trust between public and government, according to the report.

“Since trust is so essential to successful outcomes in disasters and emergencies, we must look for opportunities to build and strengthen public trust,” the report states. “Frequently the best pathway for doing so lies in ever wider and deeper channels of public participation.”

The bottom line? There are lots of possible changes ahead. Fortunately, the report goes on to offer 15 capabilities the emergency community can begin building. Today.

Of Note: An online discussion with Kaufman regarding the report’s findings was slated to be held on EMForum Thursday afternoon after DR581 had gone to press. Transcripts of EMForum webinars are usually available on the archive page soon after the discussion airs.