Deputy Secretary-General of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) Ambassador Lolita Applewhaite has said vulnerability assessment and mainstreaming risk management into overall development planning are among areas that need attention in the region to improve disaster management.
Speaking at the 7th Annual Caribbean Conference on Com-prehensive Disaster Manage-ment held recently in Montego Bay, Jamaica, Applewhaite said this was necessary to enhance the results from the implementation of the Comprehensive Disaster Management Strategy for the region.
She also identified developing ‘disaster knowledgeable’ communities; focusing on disaster risk reduction in the education system at all levels; enhancing systems through use of Information and Communi-cation Technologies (ICTs); engaging the private sector; and engaging Regional Champions as areas for increased focus, the Caricom Secretariat said in a press release.
Applewhaite 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 budgets 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 was quoted as saying.
She 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.
Applewhaite 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 alluded to interesting models emerging from such initiatives in other parts of the world.
The modernisation of national and regional hydrological and meteorological infrastructure is imperative, she said, while encouraging 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, Applewhaite said an increased effort should be made to engage and encourage it to adopt mitigation strategies that would transfer some risk currently carried by the public sector.
In welcoming the initiative of the United Nations Develop-ment Programme (UNDP) and the Department for Internation-al Development (DfID) in establishing the Political Cham-pions for Disaster Resilience group, she also 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 Com-prehensive Disaster Manage-ment,” she was quoted as saying.
