11.5 Other important considerations

Needs assessment steps can appear to be straightforward; however, they raise other important ethical dilemmas and questions. Several of these are outlined below.

First, how can the highest priority be determined? The importance of a problem can be assessed according to different criteria: its scope, its gravity, and the characteristics of the people affected. For example, a problem affecting a large population segment but with minor consequences may be considered less important than a life-threatening condition affecting a small population group. There is no rule for determining what makes a problem more important than another one—it comes down to weighing values. That is why engagement activities ensuring consultation and buy-in from different groups is important. Background information identifying a community’s main problems can be collected by different means: reports presenting a state of the situation, census data, surveys, key informants, interviews or focus groups, world cafés, brainstorms, etc. (Rossi et al., 2019). To gain social acceptance of the priorities identified, engagement activities with different community groups are crucial.

Second, how can needs be forecasted (Rossi et al., 2019)? A needs assessment based on the historic data will always lag the current situation. Given the time needed to design and implement an intervention, there is a risk that an intervention based only on existing (retrospective) data will be outdated when fully implemented. That’s not a certainty, of course, yet it is a risk. A prospective analysis (perhaps a consideration of scenarios) should be conducted to analyze what the risks will be.

Third, how can socio-environmental considerations be integrated? Compared to current needs assessment practices, new steps need to be introduced for considering planetary health and creating conditions that contribute to positive eco-systems, offer protection from climate events, and increase resiliency. In particular, when conducting a diagnostic on the context to identify needs, the evaluator should adopt a holistic approach in their forecast of the context’s evolution. International commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and preserve and promote biodiversity (United Nations, 2015, 2022) should be included in priority-setting activities and decision-making, as should the critical dimensions for all kinds of life to thrive on the planet (Richardson et al., 2023; Steffen et al., 2015).

Furthermore, with the climate already warming significantly, climate events such as flooding, heatwaves, droughts, and fires will happen more regularly and more severely and create new risks for communities and organizations. It is our responsibility to be responsive to this new evolving state of the world, which requires envisioning what these risks will be and consider both mitigation and adaptation measures, as well as ways to increase community and population resiliency (Brousselle et al., 2020). Additionally, given the linkages between environmental injustice and environmental crises, socio-environmental conditions should be considered in all needs assessments, not just environmental conditions alone. Finally. the evaluator should consider the intervention’s impacts on natural and human systems when contemplating the intervention’s potential to meet community’s needs. The Planetary Health Framework can offer support for integrating these dimensions into a holistic implementation approach to relevance analysis (Brousselle & McDavid, 2021).