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This guidance note presents a series of steps to initiate and sustain Pre Disaster Recovery Planning (PDRP) in order to ensure that communities "build back better" following a natural disaster. It offers guidance on developing a planning framework and attempts to present the key steps and considerations at a broad level, to present relevant examples, and to provide recommendations grounded in the experiences of others. It is intended to help government officials working in small communities or across an entire nation, to define and follow a process to pre plan for disaster recovery, and thereby strengthen their own future recovery efforts and outcomes.

The document is the result of a research conducted by the International Recovery Platform (IRP) in consultation with government entities and partners in Japan, the USA, and Latin America who have engaged in PDRP. It is aimed at serving to spark reflection and generate strategies to adapt the PDRP process to the reader’s context.