About
The work of Emergent Risk Management begins where existing processes start to falter.
Emergent Risk Management was founded in response to the 2023 Canadian wildfire season, which more than doubled prior area burned records. That season made one thing clear: more people and planes would no longer be enough. Emergency professionals would need new categories of tools.
We've worked inside incident teams, research agencies, and governments at the local, provincial, and national levels. The people there are not short on skill or commitment. What they often lack is the chance to develop expertise in dynamic situations, and clear metrics to track progress.
Other high-stakes professions faced similar challenges. Medicine, aviation, and intelligence each learned to develop judgment through practice, feedback, and honest measurement. We adapt those lessons to fire and emergency management, and look for expertise in unexpected places: forecasters, psychologists, cultural knowledge keepers, medical researchers.
Emergent Risk Management is not a typical firm or an academic lab. It is a space for collaborators across organizational divides to work on hard, practical questions that don't fit elsewhere. Who is in the room changes with the problem.
Our mission is not what can we know, but what must we do.
Our Principal
Jonathan Reimer
FounderAn incident commander with enough experience to know how much more there is to learn.
As Director of the WUI Branch on the 2016 Fort McMurray fire, Canada's costliest disaster and largest wildfire evacuation, Jonathan led the multi-agency response in and around the community. He has navigated the seams, and occasional ruptures, between wildfire, structural fire, and emergency management systems.
He has led response on hundreds of emergency incidents across the country, including as a Director of BC's Provincial Emergency Coordination Centre, a member of Parks Canada's National Incident Management Team, and Director of the Emergency Operations Centre for the Capital Regional District.
Alongside operations, he chairs the national steering committee for Firesight and co-authored applied research with US and Canadian Forest Service researchers. His TED talk on making difficult decisions under pressure has been viewed half a million times.
He holds a Master of Science in Environment and Management, a certificate in Leadership Development, and is a Certified Wildland Fire Manager with the Association for Fire Ecology.
