On January 2th, 2018, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) approved the finalization of the major project "unconventional emergency management research", which was one of the second batch of major projects launched by the NSFC during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan. More than 120 projects were funded in this plan, including 91 cultivation projects, 25 key support projects, 4 integrated projects. The total funding was ¥120 million. All funded projects were successfully finished at the end of 2017.

Unconventional emergencies refer to the emergencies with insufficient precursors, obvious complexity and potential secondary derivative hazards, which are difficult to deal with by conventional management modes. In recent years, unconventional emergencies frequently burst in many fields, posing a very complex situation. Therefore, how to improve our knowledge of disaster characteristics and its regularity, and thus to strengthen the ability to prevent, deal with and mitigate disasters is the first priority in ensuring normal operation and healthy development of China society.

The implementation of this plan fully embodied "limited goals, stable support, integration and sublimation, and leaping development", which is a typical program organization principle of NSFC. Aiming at the strategic demand of national public safety and crisis management, this plan focused on three major scientific problems, information processing and evolution modeling, emergency decision making, individual and population behavior response. The results were obtained by multi-disciplinary observation, experiment, and theoretical innovation and integration using research methods of management, information and psychology, listed as below:

1. Theories and methods of risk management, scenario construction, event evolution modeling and simulation were formulated, which achieved the transformation from event prevention to risk management, and from event prediction to scenario construction. “One Plan, Three Systems” was improved, and theory and method of emergency preparedness based on "situation-task-ability" was proposed. These results provided the theoretical and technical support for the construction of national emergency response system.

2. Theories and methods of online monitoring, online sensing and data mining of all kinds of hazard sources using Internet of Things were formulated. And the forewarning theories and methods based on evolution of events as well as mankind behaviors were presented. The technology and methods of the comprehensive judgment and information release were innovated, and the monitoring and early-warning system of typical events was established, using cloud computing. These results served as a cornerstone for the extension of national security and its key technology.

3. The evolution law of personnel injury, psychologic and behaviors, were obtained. Theories and methods of emergency command and coordination, intelligent decision-making and control were formulated. These results improved the core emergency response capacities when facing unconventional emergencies, such as person rescue, medical treatment, psychological and behavioral intervention, crowd evacuation and control, etc.

4. Integrated platforms at three levels, including information integration, emergency plan and emergency platform systems, were set up, which interpreted sources of National emergency plan and emergency platform system, and served as a general platform to preparation-simulation-decision-making considering Chinese conditions.

This plan facilitated the leaping development in emergency management of unconventional emergencies in China. For countermeasure patterns, it put forward theories and methods of scenario construction, accomplishing the transformation from prediction-response to scenario-response, which provided scientific basis of comprehensive public safety networks. For emergency-response patterns, it proposed theories and methods of emergency preparedness, accomplishing the transformation from emergency-response to emergency-preparedness, which provided technical support for the construction and implementation of National emergency system plan. For management mechanism, based on Internet of Things, big data and cloud computing, it achieved the transformation from administration to data-driven system, which served as an emergency platform to support national emergency management. For scope of influence, it provided the support of participation of global governance. It offered emergency-response plan for WHO, lead to draft international standards for emergency capacity evaluation, and built public safety systems countries such as Ecuador, Brazil, which extended the influence of China in emergency management.

Supported by this major research plan, Chinese researchers published 2952 papers, including 843 papers indexed by SCI/SSCI, 913 papers indexed by EI; 127 books including 25 books in English. One first-class prize and 4 second-class prizes of The State Scientific and Technological Progress Award were wined, 72 patents were authorized, 127 software copyrights were obtained, and 43 standards were formulated including 2 international standards and 11 national standards. 67 policy recommendations were proposed, on which national leaders commented for 35 times. And 127 research results were applied in domestic government departments.

Many outstanding talents in emergency management in China, including 570 PhDs, 870 masters and 77 postdoctoral fellows, were cultivated. Seven project managers were awarded the National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars, and 5 were awarded Changjiang Distinguished Professor. This plan built a multi-disciplinary emergency management subject, promoted the establishment of a first-level discipline of safety science and engineering, and facilitated the setup of China Association for Public Safety and China Society of Emergency Management. It advanced the reconstruction of National Technical Commission on the Standardization of Public Security Infrastructure and established an emergency management workgroup. Several talent occupied important positions in the international society in the field of emergency management.

The evaluation expert group believed that a series of significant breakthroughs were obtained in this major research plan, including the evolution law of unconventional emergencies, theories and methods of risk management and emergency preparedness, the system and model of monitoring and early-warning, the monitoring and early-warning methods of typical events, disaster psychological behavior law, emergency decision-making theory methods, and emergency response strategy of typical events, etc. The establishment of integrated projects and application of its results, as well as the combination of policy and technique, realized the integrated innovation and sublimation of the achievements, and enhanced the realistic possibility of the major research plan to serve the national strategic demand.

The guidance expert group pointed out that the emergency management study is transforming from passive relief to active prevention, from single disaster to compound disaster, from offline management to the combination of online and offline, from government supervision to the government-society cooperation, which should be driven by scientific innovation. Confronting with new development demand of our country, computational theories, methods and systems of a safe and resilient society should be developed further to map a new path suitable for Chinese conditions.