Abstract: Emergency message (EM) dissemination is a significant process in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and plays a vital role in road safety. Nonetheless, EMs’ dissemination while avoiding broadcast storms poses a considerable challenge. Moreover, selecting optimal cooperative forwarders is also challenging because of unreliability, high end-to-end delay, and packet loss caused by localization errors. Besides, the conventional broadcast-based schemes usually choose forwarder vehicles based on distance, neglecting the influence of links’ qualities. To that end, we propose multi-hop EM dissemination (MEMD) through optimal cooperative forwarder in grid-based fifth-generation (5G) VANET environment. To ensure reliable EMs’ dissemination, we incorporate vehicle-to-everything communication instead of the conventional short-range vehicle-to-vehicle communication. The proposed scheme obtains vehicle positions by integrating GPS measurements with a map-matching technique to avoid vehicle localization errors. Instead of a single parameter, the proposed scheme selects an optimal cooperative forwarder by using our proposed fitness function, which considers different mobility and social parameters. The proposed scheme categorizes EMs’ dissemination into single-hop and multi-hop broadcasting to avoid unnecessary rebroadcasting and communication congestion in the network. Simulation results demonstrate that for varying density, the proposed scheme achieves an average increase of 12%, 9%, and 8.9% in coverage, and 7.95%, 4%, and 3.4% in PDR, and an average reduction of 13.5%, 7.2%, and 12.7% in E2E delay, and 20.9%, 11.3%, and 4% in rebroadcast ratio, as compared to LCL, REMD, and EMDZoI, respectively.