CDEMA head: ‘Go back to the drawing board’ – Collymore shares thoughts for disaster management

EXECUTIVE Director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), Jeremy Collymore, says that the Governments in the region will have to focus more attention on town and country planning, putting emphasis on disaster risk reduction and disaster management.

Collymore, who demitted office on March 31, spoke to the media recently as he reflected on his 21 years at the helm of the regional entity and where he wants to see CDEMA and disaster management in the region go in the future, suggested that countries need to be proactive, rather than reactive when it comes to disasters.

“The whole question of how we look at our decisions about use of space, what we put next to each other...we can’t do much about it now but if you are going to expand and develop infrastructure, do you want to put them all back the same place? So that is why I am saying we have to put it back into the development basket,” he said.

Collymore added, “There is no doubt in my mind that there is awareness, the challenge to persons like ourselves, is to connect that awareness and push for policy change. That is why I feel very strongly that we really take the opportunity of these reviews of the SIDS Programme of Action, the Hyogo Framework for Action and the Millennium Develop-ment Goals, to see how these are all connected around that development problem to change that mindset; if you focus it as a disaster problem you’re not going to have much impact.”

Using the example of the British Virgin Islands, the Executive Director noted that they have used hazard vulnerability assessment to inform development control permission.

“If there is an application for development they are able to place the application to see if it is a risk high area or not and then they make recommendation to the Town Planner, not to grant permission, but what are the things that need to be associated with that permission to manage the risks in the area identified. That is what we need to be doing more of,” he said.

With that in mind, he said that some governments have already started to place the ministries responsible for housing, lands, water and climate change together, recognising that they are connected and that he said, is a move in the right direction. (JRT)