This is the story of how emergency management evolved into two parallel but highly connected systems in response to society's changing needs for safety and security. Civil defence has ancient origins but in its modern form it began in the 1930s and grew and developed during the Second World War. It underwent a further metamorphosis in the Cold War, and another reorientation in the aftermath of "9-11" in the United States. As the decade of the 2000s wore on, it acquired an ever stronger focus on homeland security and counter-terrorism. As civil defence is fundamentally centralised at the national level, civil protection grew up as the coordinated local response to hazards and disasters. Civil protection has matured to the point at which it is a parallel system to civil defence, providing safety as a counterpart to security.
