Caribbean Community (CARICOM) DSG recommends areas of focus to improve disaster management strategy results
MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica – Deputy Secretary-General of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Ambassador Lolita Applewhaite has cited several areas for increased focus in order to enhance the results from the implementation of the Comprehensive Disaster Management (CDM) Strategy for the Region.
Speaking at the 7th Annual Caribbean Conference on Comprehensive Disaster Management held recently in Montego Bay, Jamaica, Ambassador Applewhaite recommended: vulnerability assessment and Mainstreaming Risk Management into sectoral and overall development planning; developing ‘disaster knowledgeable’ communities; focusing on Disaster Risk Reduction in the Education System at all levels; enhancing systems through use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs); engaging the Private Sector; and engaging Regional Champions as areas for increased focus.
The Deputy Secretary-General said that the Caribbean experience illustrated how disasters over time spread through an economy, affecting a country’s output, its consumption of goods and services, the balance of payments and government budget all of which ultimately affected economic growth, income distribution and the level of poverty.
“These are issues that are often ignored in measuring the performance of the economies in the Caribbean and every effort should be made to address them in order to better integrate sustainable risk management into development planning,” she said.
Ambassador Applewhaite referred to the fact that several official reports on disaster risk management in the Caribbean had acknowledged that considerable experience on risk management resided in the Region but that this knowledge had either not been developed or widely shared among stakeholders or policy makers. As a result, she added, several best practices on disaster risk management in the Caribbean had either been excluded from development planning or not incorporated into development plans.
The Deputy Secretary-General called on all education stakeholders to play a part in ensuring greater incorporation of disaster risk reduction at all levels of the education system and allude to interesting models emerging from such initiatives in other parts of the world.
The modernisation of national and regional hydrological and meteorological infrastructure was imperative, Ambassador Applewhaite said and encouraged the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and early warning systems to provide useful support for the development of vulnerability indicators for the Caribbean, as an alternative to awaiting the impact of specific events to claim vulnerability. She also urged the creative use of ICTs to engage all sectors of the population, especially youth, in the development of ‘disaster knowledgeable’ communities.
With respect to the Private Sector, the Deputy Secretary-General said an increased effort should be made to engage and encourage the private sector to adopt mitigation strategies that would transfer some risk currently carried by the public sector.
In welcoming the initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Department for International Development (DFID) in establishing the Political Champions for Disaster Resilience group, she pointed out that the system of championship had proven effective in bringing visibility and resources in other areas of endeavour in the Region, as well as in other areas of the world.
“I encourage our region to foster leadership and greater regional coordination through facilitating a system of regional Champions for Comprehensive Disaster Management,” Ambassador Applewhaite said.
In her statement she paid tribute to Mr Jeremy Collymore, the Executive Director of CDEMA who is leaving office after 21 years of service, “for his brilliant contribution to Disaster Response and Management in the Region.”
