Emergency decision making for natural disasters: An overview

With the increasing trend of global warming, the frequent occurrences of natural disasters have brought serious challenges to the sustainable development of the society. Therefore, emergency decision making (EDM) for natural disasters plays an increasingly significant role in improving the capability to respond disasters. In this paper, we first elaborate the concept and characteristics of EDM for natural disasters and briefly expound emergency decision contents in different stages of natural disasters. Then, an overview is provided for the EDM theory and methods of natural disasters from the methodological perspective. After that, we give a detailed illustration of the construction of emergency decision support system. Finally, we summarize the main conclusions of the paper and point out the prospect of future researches.