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Worldwide Threat Assessment

This is one you need to read!

Emergency management is being drawn into the complex maze of risks and hazards our nation is facing in the 21st century. There are few risks that we are not expected to be prepared to respond to. One of the things I've noticed in recent years is that the more successful an individual emergency management program is in coordinating activities, they are called upon to do more work, many times outside of the direct area of emergencies and disasters. 

I think the annotated Worldwide Threat Assessment linked below is a critical read for all of us in the business. Take some time to drill through the document. Cybersecurity as an issue is not going away and will be with us today, and on into the future. As our own systems become more digitized, we will become more vulnerable as individual agencies.

"The Worldwide Threat Assessment has been presented to Congress annually by the Director of National Intelligence; and before that office was created, it was presented by the CIA Director in his position as the Director of Central Intelligence. This annual threat assessment testimony, published as text, is one of the most informative top-level products of the U.S. Intelligence Community that is publicly available. Since 2014, the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School has produced and provided a multi-media enhanced, annotated version of the text document."

Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.