THEME: ‘FIGHTING INEQUALITY FOR A RESILIENT FUTURE’
Good day one and all. A most happy and thought-provoking International Disaster Risk Reduction Day (DRR).
I greet and encourage you on this day to face it with a heightened level of reflection, introspection and acknowledgement.
As we know hazards do not impact everyone to the same extent.
There are those among us that live with a higher level of vulnerability due to a multitude of reasons, whether it be where they live or work, their economic status, health realities or support structure.
It is paramount that we address levels of inequality that exist in our society if Disaster Risk Management or Comprehensive Disaster Management as it’s practiced in the Caribbean is to be a successful and effective reality now and for successive generations.
We must seek to continually reduce the vulnerabilities and risks we face in our small twin-island nation and regionally.
The National Disaster Management system continues to strive to help address such matters through:
- Increased stakeholder engagement, improving its programmes to better serve an expanded range of needs of the public
- Enhanced local/national collaborations to help develop more inclusive, socially sensitive and responsive plans
- Education and outreach initiatives to help develop an informed populace and an enhance knowledge-based decision-making development process
- Enhanced and frequent training in areas such as
- Shelter management with consideration of gender-based violence and most vulnerable groups in our population
- Damage assessment
- Community Emergency Response Team
- Further development of early warning capacity and capabilities to reach more stakeholders within the wider society in line with the new global “Early Warning for all Initiative”
- Advocating for more inclusiveness, training youth, women and girls and those at the grass root level
- Coordination and collaboration exercises bringing together a wide array of stakeholders to work more cohesively to respond to traditional and developing hazards
All these actions help us to strengthen the social fabric of our nation, leading to stronger national systems, a more knowledgeable and capable populace and better coordination between sectors, agencies, organisations and the public.
This enables more of us to better face the ever-changing hazards, respond more effectively and efficiently to impacts and recover more quickly while building back better. In short, making our future more resilient.
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I find it disheartening that I have to spend months attempting to source information on the future impact of climate change and the potential scenarios which will occur in the Caribbean and Latin America to only find a single paragraph, a footnote, while 1st world countries have scenarios, scientifically researched and peer reviewed twenty-four-inch-thick documents, for two hundred years into the future. They know Florida, New York, Italy, parts of Britain will no longer exist but when it comes to our region it’s always natural disasters and rising sea levels. Well, what will rising sea levels do to Antigua? Will the coastlines of Antigua & Barbuda resemble what it is today two hundred years from now? Will Antigua & Barbuda be beneath the Caribbean Sea?
And what of catastrophic risk? What will become of our region should a global conflict develops, even worse, what if World War 3 began today? No amount of disaster planning can prepare us for all out nuclear war. Well, let’s hope that will be a problem for future generations to ponder and leave us living in the here and now to close our hurricane shutters, batten down our galvanize roofing, have several reserve rain harvesters for drought, pray for no major earthquakes and sip our bush tea and count our life savings, because if it is one thing I know about Antiguans is their love of money and carnal pleasures has no bounds and there will be a day of reckoning should anything interrupts either.
According to these experts we were supposed to be under water already. Barack Obama, who is one of the main climate evangelists just bought a waterfront property a year or two ago. These people think we are idiots. Think of it…even if all the sea ice in the arctic and Antarctic melted it would make no difference because the ice is already IN THE SEA. Don’t get me started on the hole in the ozone layer…How can air have a hole in it? Haven’t we learned anything from the last potential world ending disaster requiring global action and new, unproven technologies??
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