2026 CRHNet Symposium

Disaster response and recovery are most effective when the people directly affected are meaningfully engaged in decision-making, planning, and implementation. Yet, across Canada and internationally, emergency management systems still struggle to operationalize community-driven approaches beyond consultation. This presentation synthesizes findings from a meta-analysis of current research, after-action reviews, and practitioner literature to answer a core question: How can emergency management organizations more effectively engage disaster-impacted individuals as partners, not recipients, in response and recovery?

Drawing from Canadian case studies, global resilience research, and contemporary participation theory, this session distills cross-cutting best practices into actionable strategies for policy and practice. Themes include: enabling survivor leadership, co-production of recovery services, supporting spontaneous volunteer structures, removing institutional barriers, and aligning funding and governance mechanisms to support community agency rather than institutional control.

In an era of cascading crises, interconnected risks, and workforce fatigue, the next frontier of continuity and resilience is not built on plans, policies, or technology alone — it’s built on people. Human-Centered Continuity Planning reframes the traditional business continuity and emergency management lens by putting individuals — employees, students, communities, and leaders — at the heart of preparedness, response, and recovery efforts.

This presentation explores how leaders and practitioners can design continuity strategies that reflect human realities, emotional capacity, and adaptive potential. Drawing on real-world examples and emerging best practices, it argues that resilience is not just an organizational attribute; it’s a culture — one grounded in empathy, communication, inclusion, and trust.

Traditional continuity planning has long focused on assets, operations, and technology. We map our systems, document our processes, and create redundancy for infrastructure and data. But disruptions — whether a cyber breach, weather-related hazard, or organizational crisis — inevitably impact people first.

The COVID-19 pandemic made this truth impossible to ignore. When supply chains fractured, offices closed, and families juggled remote work and caregiving, the greatest determinant of continuity wasn’t the robustness of IT systems — it was the resilience, adaptability, and well-being of people. Employees became emergency responders, communicators, and problem-solvers in their own right.

Yet, many continuity frameworks still treat people as an operational resource, not as the core of resilience. Human-centered continuity planning challenges that paradigm. It insists that a plan cannot succeed if the people it depends on are burnt out, unsupported, or excluded from its creation.

In other words, a resilient organization starts with a resilient workforce.

Not everyone is equally affected by wildfires. Little is known about the experiences of older adults with access and functional needs during wildfires. This study examined the needs and challenges of older adults during the 2023 wildfire evacuation in Edson, Alberta. Interviews were conducted with 21 participants, including decision-makers, service providers, older adults involved in the evacuation, and their caregivers. Nine semi-structured interviews were completed with older adults, four with their family members, and eight key informant interviews were completed with service providers, emergency first responders, and practitioners involved in carrying out the evacuation or providing support to evacuees. To recruit participants, we employed a combination of purposive, snowball, and convenience sampling to access hard-to-reach interviewees. Participants were recruited through social media, existing institutional partnerships, and using publicly available contact information. All the interviews are audio-recorded to ensure accurate data capture. Findings from this study will inform evidence-based improvement of wildfire evacuation protocols and essential services during disasters, making evacuation more sensitive to the diverse needs and challenges of older adults.

When a flood, landslide, or infrastructure failure threatens a community, the decisions made in the hours and days before and after  matter enormously. But too often, the tools available to decision-makers are too slow, too siloed, or too technical to translate into action at the right moment.

This session explores how WSP Canada and UrbanLogiq are partnering to change that. Together, they're building GeoRisk: a platform that combines the hard-won knowledge of scientists and engineers with the pattern-recognition power of artificial intelligence to give communities a clearer, faster picture of environmental and infrastructure risk.
The real story here isn't the technology, it's what happens when domain experts and AI developers sit down together. Delegates will hear how that collaboration actually worked in practice: the friction, the breakthroughs, and the choices making the system trustworthy and explainable to the people who rely on it.

The result is a tool that helps governments ask — and answer — questions that were previously out of reach: Where should we invest in mitigation first? What does this policy decision mean for risk five years from now? Who in our community is most vulnerable, and how do we account for that equitably?

Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of what it takes to pair human expertise with AI in high-stakes environments, and what this new generation of tools means for how communities plan, protect, and invest.

A facilitated question and answer session with the Insight Talk presenters on human-centered disaster risk reduction.