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6/2/2015 7:49 AM 

Last Thursday, FEMA and its partners released the 2015 National Preparedness Report (NPR). The NPR is an annual status report summarizing the Nation's progress toward reaching the 2011 National Preparedness Goal of a secure and resilient nation. This report marks the fourth iteration of the NPR. The 2015 NPR places particular emphasis on highlighting preparedness progress in implementing the National Planning Frameworks. The Frameworks describe how the whole community works together to achieve the Goal.

The report was developed to meet the requirements of Presidential Policy Directive 8/PPD-8: National Preparedness. PPD-8 is aimed at strengthening the security and resilience of the United States through systematic preparation for the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk to the security of the Nation. The NPR also addresses several reporting requirements from the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 (PKEMRA), including components of the Federal Preparedness Report and State Preparedness Report (SPR).

The 2015 report identifies 43 key findings across the Prevention, Protection, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery mission areas, in addition to six key overarching findings listed below:

• Recent events, including the epidemic of Ebola virus disease, have highlighted challenges with coordinating the response to and recovery from complex incidents that do not receive Stafford Act declarations.

• Businesses and public-private partnerships are increasingly incorporating emergency preparedness into technology platforms, such as Internet and social media tools and services.

• Environmental Response/Health and Safety, Intelligence and Information Sharing, and Operational Coordination are additional core capabilities to sustain, which are capabilities in which the Nation has developed acceptable levels of performance for critical tasks, but which face potential performance declines if not maintained and updated to address new challenges.

• Cybersecurity, Housing, Infrastructure Systems, and Long-term Vulnerability Reduction remained national areas for improvement, and Economic Recovery re-emerged as an area for improvement from 2012 and 2013. Access Control and Identity Verification is a newly identified national area for improvement.

• Perspectives from states and territories on their current levels of preparedness were similar to previous years. All 10 core capabilities with the highest self-assessment results in 2012 and 2013 remained in the top-10 for 2014; Cybersecurity continues to be the lowest-rated core capability in state and territory self-assessments.

• While Federal departments and agencies individually assess progress for corrective actions identified during national-level exercises and real-world incidents, challenges remain to comprehensively assess corrective actions with broad implications across the Federal Government.

The NPR presents a national perspective, highlighting the contributions to preparedness made by the whole community—namely, Federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, the private and nonprofit sectors, faith-based organizations, communities, and individuals. The report also integrates data from the annual Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment process and State Preparedness Reports from the 56 states and territories. FEMA also conducted research to identify any recent independent evaluations, surveys, and other data related to the core capabilities.

For a copy of the full report go to: https://www.fema.gov/national-preparedness-report.

Questions can be directed to FEMA at: NPR@fema.dhs.gov.

For more information on national preparedness efforts, visit: http://www.fema.gov/national-preparedness.

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