At no other time in American history has the United States been so vulnerable to national security threats. The text below is for you benefit, take is seriously and don’t rely on FEMA, you are your own best resource.
National Preparedness Report
This page provides information on the 2015 National Preparedness Report, including the overarching findings on national issues, preparedness progress, and opportunities for improvement. This page is for anyone interested in seeing how preparedness can inform priorities and community actions.
National Preparedness Report
The 2015 National Preparedness Report marks the fourth iteration of this annual report. Required annually by Presidential Policy Directive 8: National Preparedness, the National Preparedness Report summarizes progress in building, sustaining, and delivering the 31 core capabilities described in the 2011 National Preparedness Goal (the Goal). Each year, the report presents an opportunity to assess gains that whole community partners—including all levels of government, private and nonprofit sectors, faith-based organizations, communities, and individuals—have made in preparedness, and to identify where challenges remain.
The intent of the National Preparedness Report is to provide the Nation with practical insights on preparedness that can inform decisions about program priorities, resource allocations, and community actions. The 2015 National Preparedness Report focuses primarily on preparedness activities undertaken or reported during 2014, and places particular emphasis on progress made in implementing the National Planning Frameworks (the Frameworks) across the Prevention, Protection, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery mission areas. The Frameworks describe how the whole community works together to achieve the goal of a secure and resilient Nation.
Overarching Findings on National Issues
In addition to key findings for each of the five preparedness mission areas, the 2015 NPR identifies overarching national trends that cut across multiple mission areas:
- Incorporating Emergency Preparedness into Technology Platforms: Businesses and public-private partnerships are increasingly incorporating emergency preparedness into technology platforms, such as Internet and social media tools and services.
- Challenges Assessing the Status of Corrective Actions: While Federal departments and agencies individually assess progress for corrective actions identified during national-level exercises and real-world incidents, challenges remain to comprehensively assess corrective actions with broad implications across the Federal Government.
- Response Coordination Challenges for Events that Do Not Receive Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (Stafford Act) Declarations: Recent events, including the epidemic of Ebola virus disease, have highlighted challenges with coordinating the response to and recovery from complex incidents that do not receive Stafford Act declarations.
The Nation Continues to Make Progress
The 2015 NPR identifies three new core capabilities – Environmental Response/Health and Safety, Intelligence and Information Sharing, and Operational Coordination – as meeting acceptable levels of performance but requiring sustained effort to maintain capability and meet emerging challenges. These capabilities join five others from the 2014 report that future National Preparedness Reports will revisit to determine if they are still meeting performance goals.
Opportunities for Improvement
The 2015 National Preparedness Report also highlights key preparedness challenges remaining for the Nation. Three core capabilities—Cybersecurity, Housing, and Infrastructure Systems—have persisted as areas for improvement across all four National Preparedness Reports. A fourth core capability, Long-term Vulnerability Reduction, repeats as an area for improvement from last year, due in part to questions surrounding the long-term solvency of the National Flood Insurance Program and nascent national efforts for climate change adaptation and green infrastructure. Preparedness data further revealed that the Federal Government, states, and territories are also struggling to build capacity for the Access Control and Identity Verification and Economic Recovery core capabilities. These areas for improvement are a reminder that preparedness gains are gradual and that solutions to complex challenges will not materialize without sustained support from the whole community.
Key Factors for Future Progress
The 2015 NPR represents the fourth opportunity for the Nation to reflect on progress in strengthening national preparedness and to identify where preparedness gaps remain. Looking across all five mission areas, the NPR provides a national perspective on critical preparedness trends for whole community partners to use to inform program priorities, to allocate resources, and to communicate with stakeholders about issues of shared concern.
Resources
- 2015 National Preparedness Report
- 2015 National Preparedness Report Summary
- Prevention Overview
- Protection Overview
- Mitigation Overview
- Response Overview
- Recovery Overview
Core Capabilities
The National Preparedness Goal identified 31 core capabilities—these are the distinct critical elements needed to achieve the goal.
These capabilities are referenced in many national preparedness efforts, including the National Planning Frameworks. The Goal grouped the capabilities into five mission areas, based on where they most logically fit. Some fall into only one mission area, while some others apply to several mission areas.
Download the capabilities crosswalk to see how the legacy Target Capabilities List compares with the new core capabilities.
Planning
- Mission Areas: All
- Description: Conduct a systematic process engaging the whole community as appropriate in the development of executable strategic, operational, and/or community-based approaches to meet defined objectives.
Public Information and Warning
- Mission Areas: All
- Description: Deliver coordinated, prompt, reliable, and actionable information to the whole community through the use of clear, consistent, accessible, and culturally and linguistically appropriate methods to effectively relay information regarding any threat or hazard, as well as the actions being taken and the assistance being made available, as appropriate.
Operational Coordination
- Mission Areas: All
- Description: Establish and maintain a unified and coordinated operational structure and process that appropriately integrates all critical stakeholders and supports the execution of core capabilities.
Forensics and Attribution
- Mission Area: Prevention
- Description: Conduct forensic analysis and attribute terrorist acts (including the means and methods of terrorism) to their source, to include forensic analysis as well as attribution for an attack and for the preparation for an attack in an effort to prevent initial or follow-on acts and/or swiftly develop counter-options.
Intelligence and Information Sharing
- Mission Areas: Prevention, Protection
- Description: Provide timely, accurate, and actionable information resulting from the planning, direction, collection, exploitation, processing, analysis, production, dissemination, evaluation, and feedback of available information concerning threats to the United States, its people, property, or interests; the development, proliferation, or use of WMDs; or any other matter bearing on U.S. national or homeland security by Federal, state, local, and other stakeholders. Information sharing is the ability to exchange intelligence, information, data, or knowledge among Federal, state, local, or private sector entities, as appropriate.
Interdiction and Disruption
- Mission Areas: Prevention, Protection
- Description: Delay, divert, intercept, halt, apprehend, or secure threats and/or hazards.
Screening, Search, and Detection
- Mission Areas: Prevention, Protection
- Description: Identify, discover, or locate threats and/or hazards through active and passive surveillance and search procedures. This may include the use of systematic examinations and assessments, sensor technologies, or physical investigation and intelligence.
Access Control and Identity Verification
- Mission Area: Protection
- Description: Apply a broad range of physical, technological, and cyber measures to control admittance to critical locations and systems, limiting access to authorized individuals to carry out legitimate activities.
Cybersecurity
- Mission Area: Protection
- Description: Protect against damage to, the unauthorized use of, and/or the exploitation of (and, if needed, the restoration of) electronic communications systems and services (and the information contained therein).
Physical Protective Measures
- Mission Area: Protection
- Description: Reduce or mitigate risks, including actions targeted at threats, vulnerabilities, and/or consequences, by controlling movement and protecting borders, critical infrastructure, and the homeland.
Risk Management for Protection Programs and Activities
- Mission Area: Protection
- Description: Identify, assess, and prioritize risks to inform Protection activities and investments.
Supply Chain Integrity and Security
- Mission Area: Protection
- Description: Strengthen the security and resilience of the supply chain.
Community Resilience
- Mission Area: Mitigation
- Description: Lead the integrated effort to recognize, understand, communicate, plan, and address risks so that the community can develop a set of actions to accomplish Mitigation and improve resilience.
Long-term Vulnerability Reduction
- Mission Area: Mitigation
- Description: Build and sustain resilient systems, communities, and critical infrastructure and key resources lifelines so as to reduce their vulnerability to natural, technological, and human-caused incidents by lessening the likelihood, severity, and duration of the adverse consequences related to these incidents.
Risk and Disaster Resilience Assessment
- Mission Area: Mitigation
- Description: Assess risk and disaster resilience so that decision makers, responders, and community members can take informed action to reduce their entity’s risk and increase their resilience.
Threats and Hazard Identification
- Mission Area: Mitigation
- Description: Identify the threats and hazards that occur in the geographic area; determine the frequency and magnitude; and incorporate this into analysis and planning processes so as to clearly understand the needs of a community or entity.
Critical Transportation
- Mission Area: Response
- Description: Provide transportation (including infrastructure access and accessible transportation services) for response priority objectives, including the evacuation of people and animals, and the delivery of vital response personnel, equipment, and services into the affected areas.
Environmental Response/Health and Safety
- Mission Area: Response
- Description: Ensure the availability of guidance and resources to address all hazards including hazardous materials, acts of terrorism, and natural disasters in support of the responder operations and the affected communities.
Fatality Management Services
- Mission Area: Response
- Description: Provide fatality management services, including body recovery and victim identification, working with state and local authorities to provide temporary mortuary solutions, sharing information with mass care services for the purpose of reunifying family members and caregivers with missing persons/remains, and providing counseling to the bereaved.
Infrastructure Systems
- Mission Area: Response, Recovery
- Description: Stabilize critical infrastructure functions, minimize health and safety threats, and efficiently restore and revitalize systems and services to support a viable, resilient community.
Mass Care Services
- Mission Area: Response
- Description: Provide life-sustaining services to the affected population with a focus on hydration, feeding, and sheltering to those who have the most need, as well as support for reunifying families.
Mass Search and Rescue Operations
- Mission Area: Response
- Description: Deliver traditional and atypical search and rescue capabilities, including personnel, services, animals, and assets to survivors in need, with the goal of saving the greatest number of endangered lives in the shortest time possible.
On-scene Security and Protection
- Mission Area: Response
- Description: Ensure a safe and secure environment through law enforcement and related security and protection operations for people and communities located within affected areas and also for all traditional and atypical response personnel engaged in lifesaving and life-sustaining operations.
Operational Communications
- Mission Area: Response
- Description: Ensure the capacity for timely communications in support of security, situational awareness, and operations by any and all means available, among and between affected communities in the impact area and all response forces.
Public and Private Services and Resources
- Mission Area: Response
- Description: Provide essential public and private services and resources to the affected population and surrounding communities, to include emergency power to critical facilities, fuel support for emergency responders, and access to community staples (e.g., grocery stores, pharmacies, and banks) and fire and other first response services.
Public Health and Medical Services
- Mission Area: Response
- Description: Provide lifesaving medical treatment via emergency medical services and related operations and avoid additional disease and injury by providing targeted public health and medical support and products to all people in need within the affected area.
Situational Assessment
- Mission Area: Response
- Description: Provide all decision makers with decision-relevant information regarding the nature and extent of the hazard, any cascading effects, and the status of the response.
Economic Recovery
- Mission Area: Recovery
- Description: Return economic and business activities (including food and agriculture) to a healthy state and develop new business and employment opportunities that result in a sustainable and economically viable community.
Health and Social Services
- Mission Area: Recovery
- Description: Restore and improve health and social services networks to promote the resilience, independence, health (including behavioral health), and well-being of the whole community.
Housing
- Mission Area: Recovery
- Description: Implement housing solutions that effectively support the needs of the whole community and contribute to its sustainability and resilience.
Natural and Cultural Resources
- Mission Area: Recovery
- Description: Protect natural and cultural resources and historic properties through appropriate planning, mitigation, response, and recovery actions to preserve, conserve, rehabilitate, and restore them consistent with post-disaster community priorities and best practices and in compliance with appropriate environmental and historical preservation laws and executive orders.
