Building resilience into emergency management

Emergency management faces a changed reality in terms of possibilities and threats with use of new technology. Due to the ongoing changes in the operation of oil and gas production, different constellations of actors in a distributed system are built. This introduces opportunities for planning and operation. At the same time as new technology offers opportunities, the technology-enabled distributed network of actors generate challenges for emergency handling. The purpose of the study presented has been to look for possibilities for making emergency management more resilient by becoming a part of continuous risk and hazard management. The suggested three main elements that are important to consider in the development of future emergency management are (1) proactive emergency management through early risk anticipation: and emergency management's adaptation to new and future work practices such as (2) distributed actors and (3) new technology. Based on these results we suggest broadening the scope of emergency management to systematically include monitoring, anticipation, responding and learning. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.