Post-Disaster Needs Assessment

The Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) is a harmonized, government-led methodology for quantifying the effects of a disaster and costing a recovery program. Agreed in 2008 by the European Union, the World Bank (through GFDRR), and the United Nations Development Group, and codified in the PDNA Guidelines, it fuses two traditions: the ECLAC damage-and-loss accounting (DaLA), which values destroyed assets and the economic flows foregone during recovery, and a human-and-recovery-needs assessment, which captures impacts on people's lives, livelihoods, and access to services. Conducted sector by sector against a pre-disaster baseline, a PDNA produces a single consolidated picture of total disaster effects and feeds a costed Recovery Framework that increasingly embeds build-back-better resilience, giving governments and donors a common basis for mobilizing and prioritizing recovery resources.