The Future Cell explores the ways Strategic Foresight, a planning oriented discipline who’s focused attention is on the future, might augment existing Disaster Risk Reduction frameworks and Crisis Management operations with Foresight processes, tools and methods.

As an organization, Future Cell is focused on nurturing and developing a new capability by introducing Strategic Foresight methods to the Disaster Risk Reduction and the Emergency Management community of practitioners, and designing new processes, and tools to fit the unique needs and requirements of a discipline whose primary focus has been on mitigating immediate crises.

As a tool, the Future Cell has two complementary components that are valuable for the Planning Section of the IMS/ICS structure and existing processes. The first focuses on the development of a method for enhancing situational awareness for public safety professionals, emergency managers, and critical decision makers during a crisis through the creation of an anticipatory tool for emerging issues analysis.

The second is about building a relational database that identifies and categorizes emerging issues as well as their response efforts in a systematic and contextualized way so that nations experiencing an emergent issue could benefit from response efforts where the contextual variables were the same and subsequently accelerate learning on a global scale.