Adapting the emergency management enterprise to manage the climate emergency: a critical review

This paper critically examines the potential for leveraging the U.S. emergency management (EM) enterprise to enhance national resilience to future acute climate risks. Climate adaptation has long been recognized as a key risk management tool for addressing the climate emergency. Despite evidence of progress in implementing adaptation in the United States, the Nation faces mounting disaster losses and an expanding adaptation gap driven by limited policy frameworks, financial constraints, lack of awareness, and deeply rooted social vulnerability.

Through a multi-phase literature review and analysis of strategic foresight studies, the research identifies three key themes shaping the future of EM—growing hazard complexity, tensions over agency and resource distribution, and eroding public trust and social connectivity. These factors collectively constrain EM's capacity to manage intensifying climate-related shocks. However, mainstreaming adaptation concepts into EM practice could help reorient the enterprise to better manage future risk while leveraging EM's established workforce infrastructure, funding mechanisms, and policy frameworks. Though challenging given the current U.S. sociopolitical dynamics around EM and climate action, such integration would yield mutual benefits: EM would become more forward-looking, inclusive, and capable of addressing underlying social vulnerabilities, while adaptation objectives would benefit from the institutional maturity of the EM enterprise. The review concludes with recommendations for reforming policy frameworks, expanding local capacity, and professionalising adaptation within EM to create a flexible, climate-ready enterprise capable of managing the escalating risks of a warming world.