What makes GIS so important is its ability to interact with and influence all aspects of disaster management including its mitigation, preparation, response and recovery phases. This has transformed the way society responses to these events. GIS achieves effective management through its ability to take complex data sets and transforms them into understandable and usable information Hartfield 2020 For disaster management GIS offers the capability to understand the relationship that exists between a location, people, features and resources. In other words, this capability to conduct spatial analysis between data points means GIS can assist in locating, identifying, and understanding connections between potential areas of vulnerability and potential hazard exposure Holser 2016.

The technological advancement and the use of social media has facilitated the speed, quantity and quality of first hand information attained from the ground from community members. From the Haiti earthquake in 2010 to the COVID-19 world pandemic of 2020 it has shown the world how collective efforts materialised in the form map based EMD to assist assessing the severity of the event and damages caused. This can then be used to improve situational awareness, decrease response and recovery time. However it does not come without problems of reliability, volume and cosistancy. As such a framework must be in place to ensure that this method adds value within the GIS application by providing consistent, analysable data and that neither too little or to much information is collected. Often data requires futher sorting to be utalized but this issues maybe resolved as the progression of artifical intelligence and data mining evolves. Spatial Sciences Institute 2019