From ECLAC

ECLAC ensures Caribbean countries are better equipped to deal with disasters

Three Caribbean countries will benefit from disaster training workshops over the last quarter of this year. Between October and December 2018, a team of experts from the Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) subregional headquarters for the Caribbean, led by the Coordinator of the Sustainable Development and Disaster Unit, Dr. Omar Bello, will conduct Damage and Loss Assessment (DaLA) trainings in Anguilla, the Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos islands.

The training courses are offered as a follow-up to the disaster assessment missions carried out last year to quantify the economic, social and environmental effects and impacts of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in those countries.

Disaster preparedness and risk management have important implications for policy making, and impact in a variety of ways the decisions and choices made by people in their daily lives. It is in this context that the workshops carried out by ECLAC Caribbean aim to equip national officers in Anguilla, the Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos islands with the skills and resources necessary to support their governments’ future efforts to incorporate prevention, estimation and risk reduction in public investment plans and development programmes.

The workshops will focus on the methodology and tools necessary to assess the impacts of a disaster on the social, infrastructure and productive sectors. Moreover, the ability to carry out a sectoral estimation of the impacts of a disaster in terms of damage, losses and additional costs will enable countries to determine the resources needed to restore social and economic activities, as well as the investments required to ensure a resilient reconstruction process.

ECLAC Caribbean and CCRIF SPC (formerly the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility) have joined forces to promote these DaLA trainings, as well as to promote financial protection mechanisms for disasters in the three countries. In the Bahamas, the workshop will be organized with the support of the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB).