A couple of elementary sources of information about disaster or emergency management and crisis management can be found below. The first concerns communities, while the second concerns organizations. Both sources come from Wikipedia. With due caution, the information provided is quite useful. Here are the relevant URLs:
A. Disaster or Emergency Management - Communities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_management
B. Crisis Management - Organizations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_management
By the way, “disaster” is a better term than “emergency” in the context of climate change. The first term is more general, for it allows for repeating disasters like forest fires and floods, whereas the second makes sense with disasters like earthquakes.
One of the key ideas here is the disaster management cycle, which includes four phases: preparation, response, recovery, and mitigation. This cycle is repeated indefinitely. The community facing disasters continually learns in the process and adjusts to changing conditions it faces.
The most important aspect of disaster management is that it differs from one community to another. Even neighboring communities may face very different challenges due to differences in size, location, financial and other resources, and so on. Therefore, disaster management needs to be addressed by each and every community separately and independently. The only common feature is the set of general principles. However, they are useful as a starting point in the disaster management cycle.
Returning to CCCP, the team concerned with disaster management can prepare a short document along the lines of Wikipedia entries above and post it on the CCCP website. It could provide links to relevant websites on the World Wide Web, but it should not be longer than a few pages or about a couple of thousand words. This document can be prepared in English so as to be of use at the Paris climate talks, but it can also be translated into the languages of all the nations that will be working together under the CCCP umbrella. As an objective for the disaster management team, this appears to be both viable and useful in the long run.
Again, all comments and suggestions are welcome.
Ranko Bon
CCCP Disaster Management Team Coordinator