Develop pre-disaster recovery actions and identify priorities for building recovery capacity.
Now that you have described your community’s disaster risk and vulnerabilities, as well as evaluated your community’s capabilities, it is time to start identifying specific pre-disaster recovery actions and priorities. This will ensure that you are building resilience before a disaster occurs to reduce the impacts of future events and build capacity for recovery. It will also help you identify where and how to implement strategies or mainstream them into other planning efforts. The application of individual resilience strategies will depend on the key concern being addressed, the sector the action applies to, and the existing planning efforts and resources available to the community.
Reassessing your community’s overarching resilience goals and vision will help guide your efforts. In addition, broad community engagement, continued engagement with your team of technical advisors, and other community experts will support the innovative, effective, and equitable actions your community needs to prepare for a disaster before it occurs.
In addition, you don’t have to start from scratch. Resilience strategies and actions are being developed by communities across the state, country, and world. This broad list of seed strategies will give you a foundation to start from when thinking about which strategies will work best for your community. Do not be afraid to lean into this larger network. But be sure to look across your community and broader region for synergies to the planning work you are doing. Not all of the pre-disaster recovery actions you identify should make the final cut into the plan. Evaluating your list of resilience actions based on specific criteria will ensure that you are using a systematic approach to making recommendations for their integration into your plan and their ultimate implementation.
For the detailed process on how to develop general resilience strategies, see Step 4 of the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit. Also, use the strategies and actions tab in the Pre-disaster Planning Workbook for support on this step. From there, be sure to include them in the Pre-disaster Recovery Plan Template.