The Emergency Management Handbook provides a groundwork on which emergency services can build a strong foundation for disaster and emergency management and homeland security in the 21st century. Many relatively new requirements, standards, rules, policies, regulations, presidential directives, and laws exist. The main focus of the handbook is to address the requirements of NFPA® 1600, Standard on Emergency Management and Business Continuity Programs (2007) as a minimum and build on them to provide even more information to the reader.

It was written by emergency management planning professionals for emergency management practitioners, managers, professors, and students along with the news media and the general public. The purpose was to provide a reference book addressing as much as possible the issues, policies, questions, best practices, and lessons learned through recent years.

This handbook is a way to support the efforts of emergency responders and emergency managers around the world and reach out in partnership. A major objective was to provide the maximum assistance to them in the way of useable information and references. This handbook is holistic in its approach and is not limited to response but covers all four phases of emergency management: preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery.

Most importantly, this handbook uses and supports the ALL HAZARDS approach to emergency management, meaning that when emergency personnel throughout the nation spend time planning, training, and exercising to prepare for, mitigate against, respond to, and recover from disasters, they are more ready to handle any and all disasters, whether natural or human induced.