March 2nd

What happened this week?

The CARICOM 29th Inter-Sessional Meeting: the Caribbean Community's push to build a more climate-resilient community

The President of Haiti (current Chairman of CARICOM) addressed the opening ceremony of the Twenty-Ninth Inter-sessional Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM, in Port-au-Prince on Monday and placed much emphasis on climate change, natural disasters and funding for recovery. He highlighted the need for a new mechanism for disaster risk funding that would assist affected Member States to quickly recover and reconstruct... Read more

The CARICOM 29th Inter-Sessional Meeting: CARICOM addresses their needs for concessional financing for climate resilience


CARICOM's Secretary-General Ambassador Irwin LaRocque emphasized the need for significant grant funding and very concessional financing in order to meet the Caribbean Community’s goal of creating a climate resilient region. He addressed that the common obstacle of most CARICOM countries is their ineligibility for concessional development financing and Official Development Assistance (ODA), due to the use of GDP per capita as the principal criterion, as most are categorized as middle or high-income countries ... Read more


Interesting Facts

Investments in forecasting and research has yielded more accurate predictions for the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season.

The devastating 2017 Atlantic hurricane season produced 17 named storms of which 10 became hurricanes. Not only had the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provided vital forecasts and data to communities in the path of this year’s storms that contributed to saving many lives, but also NOAA's preliminary data show that the National Hurricane Center issued forecasts with record-setting accuracy. Track forecasts for the three most damaging hurricanes were about 25 percent more accurate than average... Read more

Policy Developments and Outlook

Jamaica to Host Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Center. 

According to Jamaica's Minister of Tourism, Hon. Edmund Bartlett, Jamaica will host a tourism resilience and crisis management center to deal with climate-related issues. The center is to be located at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus and will serve the Caribbean, providing information, expertise, technical advice and guidance. It will be armed with guidelines, tool kits and policies to handle the recovery process in the event of a crisis, facilitating information flow among all stakeholders in the tourism industry within and outside of the region... Read more