Emergency management aims to develop strategies and establish operations to decrease the potential impact of unexpected events (i.e., human or natural disasters). By quick response and rescue, it saves human lives from the secondary disasters and enhances the stability of communities after disasters.

Emergency management involves four stages: Planning and Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery. Geospatial applications (including GIS) have been extensively used in each stage of emergency management. Decision-makers can utilize the geospatial information to develop planning and mitigation strategies. GIS models and simulation capabilities are used to exercise response and recovery plans during non-disaster times. They help the decision-makers understand near real-time possibilities during an event. Once disaster occurs, GIS will take effect in real time response and recovery activities. For example, in the Great Earthquake of Nepal in April 2015, the DigitalGlobe supplied plenty of remote sensing and geographic data for rescue.

Emergency management has drawn the attention of government entities and researchers. For example, there is a major national research program on emergency management in China. As part of this program, researchers have completed considerable cutting-edge work on emergency management. However, due to the multi-faceted complexity of emergency situations, plenty of data and models are utilized in the whole process. How to integrate these data and models, such as the integration of the GIS data layers and dangerous chemicals diffusion data, appears as a big issue faced by emergency management. Furthermore, emergency management requires lots of new geospatial technologies to support the quick response and recovery and the integrating of location-based wireless information streams. With the advances of GIS technologies, the improvement of emergency management research becomes possible.