Why you shouldn’t panic about governments urging citizens to maintain emergency preparedness kits

In October 2026, posts appeared on social media claiming that governments around the world were suddenly recommending their citizens to prepare emergency kits with enough supplies for at least three days, and that the release of such guidelines was both coordinated and a sign that some unspecified catastrophic, life-changing event was about to happen. 

“What on earth is about to begin?” read one Japanese-language post spreading the rumor. 

Several Snopes readers contacted us and asked for an investigation into the claim. 

The claim is based in some truth, but the implication that these recommendations mean a catastrophic or destabilizing global event is looming is unfounded. The risk of a catastrophic or destabilizing global event is ever present and governments have urged their citizens for decades to be prepared for emergencies.

The emergency preparedness campaigns

Announcements in several countries — primarily the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States — appear to have been the basis for the claims. 

In the United Kingdom, the Cabinet Office announced a new campaign in August 2026 requesting citizens to “stock up on tinned food and take steps to ensure they are prepared for national emergencies,” according to The Guardian. Details of the campaign, called “Be Ready,” were officially announced in October. The website asks everyone to ensure they stock enough water, food, cash, first aid supplies and more for at least three days.

According to The Guardian, Defense Minister Wes Streeting did explicitly cite “state-sponsored terrorism” against critical infrastructure as a reason to be prepared.

In Japan, according to the Library of Congress, the government passed a law in August establishing a new disaster management agency. The agency, which will report directly to the prime minister and will be led by Goshi Hosono, is expected to help centralize disaster management in the country when it becomes official on Nov. 2. 

In an October interview with Fuji TV, Hosono said his first action once the agency is officially established will be to issue an “emergency request” to all citizens to ensure they are prepared for disasters. Similarly to the British campaign, Hosono asked the general public to be stock supplies for at least three days, and ideally up to a week. However, Hosono’s public comments seemed to focus exclusively natural disasters — primarily earthquakes, which are common in Japan.

Finally, in the United States, reporting from Fortune covered a new Department of Defense initiative called “FORTRESS” that aims to ensure military bases can operate fully autonomously for at 90 days. The initiative, announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his Sept. 30 “State of the Force” address, involves ensuring that U.S. military bases can generate their own electricity without relying on the civilian grid. 

“Power is combat now,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell reportedly told Fox News Digital. “Without electricity, you lose communications, water, logistics, assembly lines and just basic military command structures.”

The initiative also involves making sure military bases have access to water, fuel and outside communications for that 90-day time period, according to that Fox News Digital story. 

(On the civilian side, the Federal Emergency Management Agency last updated its guidance on emergency preparedness in July 2026, according to its website.)

The posts also claimed the emergency preparedness messaging was not limited to just the U.S., U.K. and Japan. Lists also named Belgium, Ireland, Germany, Poland, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Switzerland, Taiwan and the European Union as issuing similar stockpiling recommendations.

Snopes found news reporting from Belgium and Ireland showing both countries had also issued new emergency guidelines in September and October 2026, while most of the other countries named had done so in the past two years, as had the European Union.

However, the fact the European Union released a new preparedness strategy in March 2025 makes the list look much less dramatic: European countries were simply falling in line with the new EU guidance. Searching the EU’s Civil Protection Knowledge Network website helped confirm this: we found brochures on emergency preparedness tagged under “population preparedness,” aimed at citizens of almost all the previously named EU countries (all but Ireland), plus several more — Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, Czechia and Greece.

So why now?

Of course, just issuing a warning about preparedness does not mean an emergency is imminent — the whole concept is to be prepared because you never know when an emergency might strike, and that’s why governments have issued such warnings for decades. In the U.S., for instance, the government has maintained a civil defense office in some form since 1941, and Snopes found the recommendation to stockpile at least some supplies is quite common across guidelines.

In this case, there were likely several factors influencing the guidelines issued across Europe.

First, while natural disasters remain a threat across the entire world, Europe has recently faced more powerful storms in the winter and extreme heat waves and wildfires in the summer due to climate change. The more severe an event, the harder it is for emergency services to immediately respond to everyone.

Second, the European continent has become increasingly concerned about war following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “[War] no longer feels quite so far-fetched,” a German pamphlet issued in November 2025 reads. While direct war itself might still be unlikely, the methods of waging war have changed dramatically as the world has become more interconnected.

Countries like Russia and China are known to run sophisticated cyber warfare operations, and some worry that sensitive infrastructure, including basic utilities, could be threatened via direct or indirect sabotage. The governments are absolutely concerned about any holes in their system. In October, the Danish, Dutch, French and Finnish governments briefly took their websites offline after a group of intelligence agencies released a statement announcing critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a widely-used coding language, according to Reuters. (The vulnerabilities were quickly fixed.)

Sources