A Tale of Five Cities: Assessing Emergency Management for Future Disasters in the United States

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Abstract
Many cities across the United States (U.S.) face threats from natural hazards, and as climate change continues to worsen, cities will face increased risks. Emergency management helps cities to mitigate these risks and adapt to shifting threats. Based on the Rockefeller City Resilience Framework and City Resilience Index Driver 3, Indicator 3.4, the scope of this research was to develop an emergency management maturity model and explore emergency management capacity for future disasters based on an assessment of five cities across the U.S. With the resulting data, a city’s score would serve as an evaluation of the emergency response indicator (Indicator 3.4) in order to eventually enter the City Resilience Index. The cities selected were Buffalo, New York; Honolulu, Hawaii; Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Saint Paul, Minnesota, based on their hazard/risk factors. It should be noted that these scores were intended to compare resilience in a city over time and identify unique areas in which the cities could improve emergency management and were not meant to rank the cities against each other. An interesting find was the overlap between the counties and cities regarding policy data, creating a new avenue for research in local level emergency management.

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