Geographic information systems (GIS) involves computerization of data used in the management system to display, capture, manage, store and retrieved spatial information. Due to this technical nature, GIS can easily be used during Emergency Management since it contains georeferenced data to coordinate different projection system. This enables the exact placement of features on the surface of the earth. In addition, it supports spatial relationship on the mapped features.

Proper Emergency Management can be achieved through the following four phrases.

Mitigation

This involves foundation activities that are meant to reduce loss life or property from occurrence of any disaster. The robust modeling data from GIS can be used to fix the pattern of disaster destruction. These activities serve for a long term due to reconstruction and repairing of the damaged parts.

Preparedness

GIS can be used in Emergency Management to help in the process of a continuous cycle of evaluation, training, organizing and taking relevant action. This ensures that adequate coordination is incorporated when responding to the disaster incident.

Response

This is the execution of the emergency action to protect property, sustain basic human needs and to save the life. GIS can be used in this phrase to predict the like wood of an emergency occurring and prepare safety measures in advance to reduce the spread of destruction.

Recovery

This is a form of Emergency Management whereby different measures are taken to reconstruct and renovate the community to its original condition after disaster. GIS can be applied in this situation by introducing emergency management personnel or decision makers to help on how society can be reconstructed to its previous state.

Geocoding is also another technique that can be used in emergency management. It involves the process of locating coordinates from associated geographic features. This can be found from other geographic data using ZIP codes or Street addresses. On the other hand, direct sensing and remote sensing can be used in emergency management because both of them requires the practical or technological science of acquiring information about the planet earth. However, remote sensing is slightly different from direct sensing since it depends mostly on satellites while direct sensing depends mostly on the computerized data. Remote sensing also contains passive sensing which can be used to measure the amount of energy available. This energy can be stored by the satellite to enables them respond to a disaster even when there is no sun.