Rhon­dor Dowlat

Ear­ly-warn­ing Sys­tems are cur­rent­ly be­ing looked at on Dis­as­ter Risk Re­duc­tion (DRR) by the As­so­ci­a­tion of Caribbean States (ACS).Ac­cord­ing to chair­man of the ACS Spe­cial Com­mit­tee for DRR, Therese Mar­i­anne-Pepin, about Eu­ros$200m have been bud­get­ed for the ACS, 25 per cent of which will be al­lo­cat­ed to work on nat­ur­al haz­ards and its con­se­quences.

Min­is­ter of Plan­ning and Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Dr Bhoen­dra­datt Tewarie, in his open­ing re­marks at the 22nd meet­ing of the Spe­cial Com­mit­tee for DRR on Fri­day, spoke of the first plan, which is the Hyo­go Frame­work for Ac­tion (HFA)."It's goal is to sub­stan­tial­ly re­duce dis­as­ter loss­es by 2015 by build­ing re­silience of na­tions and com­mu­ni­ties to dis­as­ters. This means re­duc­ing loss of lives and so­cial, eco­nom­ic, and en­vi­ron­men­tal as­sets when haz­ards strike."

He not­ed that the biggest threat to risk man­age­ment in the re­gion is the ris­ing sea lev­els."There are man­made po­ten­tial tragedies, I men­tioned ter­ror­ism threat and no coun­try is in­vul­ner­a­ble to those threats so you al­ways have the se­cu­ri­ties ques­tion and in some of our coun­tries there are pos­si­bil­i­ties for dis­as­ter hav­ing to do with ex­plo­sion in en­er­gy sites and that is why you need first of all to be alert in your own coun­try, or­gan­ised and pre­pared as you can be."

Sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the ACS Al­fon­so Munera Cava­dia ex­plained that while they are work­ing on ear­ly-warn­ing sys­tems, they need­ed to know more about the Ter­ri­to­r­i­al Sys­tem. "In terms of, what are the re­al prob­lem that are faced in the whole Caribbean, in terms of sea and ter­ri­to­ry.

Tewarie said in Ju­ly Cab­i­net agreed to the cre­ation of a Na­tion­al Spar­tial Da­ta In­fra­struc­ture Coun­cil (NS­DI). "Draft leg­is­la­tion has al­ready been pre­pared, in ad­di­tion to the re­quired poli­cies and guide­lines. A NS­DI would en­hance work al­ready be­ing done in the area of dis­as­ter risk re­duc­tion by en­sur­ing that de­ci­sion mak­ers have ac­cess to crit­i­cal da­ta in a time­ly man­ner."

He said that Small Is­land De­vel­op­ment States (SIDS) are lo­cat­ed among the most vul­ner­a­ble re­gions in the world in re­la­tion to the in­ten­si­ty and fre­quen­cy of nat­ur­al haz­ards.