Emergency management professionals are the backbone of disaster response, working tirelessly to help communities recover from hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and more. However, increasing demands and chronic burnout threaten their ability to respond effectively.

AEM Bulletin: Former FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor discusses the increasing frequency of natural disasters and the need for proactive development of crisis leaders. Gaynor emphasizes the importance of investing in leadership training to ensure preparedness for future crises, highlighting the need for skills in AI, resource management, and climate change adaptation.

Former FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor highlights the dire state of America's disaster response workforce in this op-ed. As natural disasters increase in frequency and severity, emergency managers face unprecedented burnout, leading to staffing shortages and increased risks for all Americans.

Prepare, mitigate, respond, recover. It’s a cycle I have been through thousands of times. Navigating hundreds of disasters and crises ranging from small to seemingly impossible is all part of the job when you are leading emergency management agencies at the local, state, and federal levels.

What is the lifecycle of a disaster? First, there’s the actual disaster: implementing emergency protective measures, and doing everything possible to save lives and minimize property damage while the threat is active. Once the threat to human life has subsided, we enter the next stage…

There is a tendency in our field to focus only on the first half of recovery. We all generally agree the recovery starts immediately after the response and think it’s over when the FEMA Joint Field Office leaves town. But when we view the finish line as the day when most of the Individual and Public Assistance missions have wrapped up, we miss the most important (and hardest) part…