The years since Hurricane Katrina have seen the development of robust and centralized disaster response, hazard mitigation, climate resilience, and climate action plans by the City of New Orleans—all while recovering from and facing other disasters.

The Comprehensive Recovery Framework (CRF) represents a strong step in leveraging that experience to formally fill a coordination gap across the disaster management continuum in New Orleans.

The CRF primarily serves to formalize a well-organized approach to disaster recovery based on the experience of New Orleanians along with best practices from around the world. The CRF is both an operational plan and a vision document, establishing a Disaster Recovery Framework for governance and implementation of disaster recovery actions as well as evaluative criteria for recovery efforts related to the core recovery values of the City of New Orleans, namely equity, sustainability, and resilience.

Developing and implementing the CRF has six central purposes, which each set of recommendations seeks to achieve:

1. To establish disaster recovery as a distinct phase of disaster management for the City of New Orleans and its partners
2. To organize a predictable, flexible, and scalable framework for disaster recovery leadership and management for the City of New Orleans and its partners
3. To serve as leverage when seeking additional recovery resources from public and private sources before and during disaster recovery
4. To serve as a guidance document for all future disaster-specific recovery planning efforts
5. To document goals and metrics for recovery progress before a disaster and provide a framework for continuous improvement efforts
6. To map capacities and collaboration expectations of implementation partners providing services during disaster recovery

With these purposes in mind, the CRF lays out recommendations for how to take confident steps toward a well-managed and organized disaster recovery no matter what challenges face us.