Jean-Marc Ram­per­sad

The Coali­tion for Dis­as­ter Re­silient In­fra­struc­ture (CDRI) is is­su­ing a stark re­minder that re­silience is no longer just an in­fra­struc­ture strat­e­gy; it is the on­ly path to sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

In a per­fect world, even if emis­sions, and by ex­ten­sion tem­per­a­tures, are brought un­der con­trol, the se­vere weath­er events that we see glob­al­ly are not go­ing to go away im­me­di­ate­ly. There­fore, we must still plan for their im­pacts by de­vel­op­ing re­silient struc­tures and process­es.

An­dres Cruz, Se­nior Spe­cial­ist for In­fra­struc­ture for Re­silient Is­land States (IRIS) at CDRI, high­light­ed the pre­car­i­ous eco­nom­ic re­al­i­ty fac­ing the re­gion. With the Caribbean al­ready suf­fer­ing an an­nu­al av­er­age loss of around 14 per cent of the Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct (GDP) due to dis­as­ters, the mar­gin for er­ror is van­ish­ing.

To com­bat this, CDRI is cur­rent­ly man­ag­ing 12 projects across 11 SIDS glob­al­ly. In the Caribbean, this in­cludes as­sess­ing build­ing codes in Do­mini­ca fol­low­ing Hur­ri­cane Maria, de­vel­op­ing ear­ly warn­ing sys­tems in Be­lize and the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, and en­gag­ing in high-lev­el talks with T&T re­gard­ing drainage so­lu­tions for Port of Spain and hous­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in To­ba­go.

The foun­da­tion is now be­ing laid for CDRI in T&T, with an as­sess­ment of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties to soon fol­low. Cruz said that the im­ple­men­ta­tion process for sin­gle-coun­try projects usu­al­ly spans two years.

“The Caribbean is the sec­ond most dis­as­ter-prone re­gion in the world,” Cruz stat­ed. “Cli­mate change is on­ly in­ten­si­fy­ing this and mak­ing it worse.”

A ma­jor fo­cus of CDRI’s mis­sion at COP30 is shift­ing the nar­ra­tive from dis­as­ter re­sponse to proac­tive re­dun­dan­cies. Cruz not­ed that many is­land na­tions suf­fer from ‘sin­gle-point-of-fail­ure’ in­fra­struc­ture sys­tems, where a hit to the pow­er grid cas­cades in­to a to­tal col­lapse of es­sen­tial ser­vices.

“In the hous­ing sec­tor, health sec­tor, roads, pow­er, we on­ly have one sys­tem on the is­land,” Cruz ex­plained. “We have a hur­ri­cane, and the pow­er sec­tor col­laps­es. But with­out the pow­er sec­tor, you don’t have food be­cause you can­not re­frig­er­ate, you don’t have com­mu­ni­ca­tion, you don’t have wa­ter be­cause you don’t have the pumps.”

How­ev­er, the chal­lenge re­mains fi­nan­cial. Cruz ar­gued that po­lit­i­cal lead­ers of­ten hes­i­tate to fund in­vis­i­ble pre­ven­tion mea­sures, de­spite the over­whelm­ing eco­nom­ic log­ic.