The Pacific Islands Emergency Management Alliance helps strengthen the co-ordinated approach emergency services need to take when preparing, responding and recovering from disaster. 

It strengthens the capacity of key national response agencies in Pacific Island countries and territories.  Funding support is provided by the European Union’s Building Safety and Resilience in the Pacific project.  It focuses on building trust, leadership and teamwork in response agencies whilst creating common language, systems and doctrines.

Background

The Pacific Islands Emergency Management Alliance began in 2014 as part of the Building Safety and Resilience in the Pacific project.  PIEMA was created with a range of stakeholders who invested in helping create best-practice emergency response across the entire region.  As the BSRP project objectives focus on increasing resilience to disaster along with more coordinated disaster management and climate change adaptation this PIEMA alliance helps make this a reality within the emergency services sector.

The Pacific Islands Emergency Management Alliance (PIEMA) helps strengthen the co-ordinated approach emergency services need to take when preparing for, responding to and recovering from disaster.  It strengthens the capacity of key national response agencies in Pacific Island countries and territories.  It focuses on building trust, leadership and teamwork in response agencies whilst creating common language, systems and doctrines to ensure consistent and credible information is able to be collected and used in times of crisis.

How does it work?

PIEMA is an alliance of key emergency management sectors in the Pacific, namely the Regional Disaster Managers (National Disaster Management Office, NDMO), Pacific Islands Chiefs of Police Conference (PICP) and the Pacific Islands Fire & Emergency Services Association (PIFESA).

PIEMA was formed in 2014 through the support of the Pacific Community (SPC), Australasian Fire & Emergency Services Council (AFAC), UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) and the NZ Ministry for Civil Defence and Emergency Management (MCDEM).  PIEMA has a membership of 21 Countries and 15 agencies