A series of regional workshops have been scheduled on Disaster Risk Management Strategy for Sustainable Tourism in the
Caribbean. The Hilton Hotel in
Kingston will host the National Workshop on May 5th- 6th, 2008, from 8:30 am – 4:30 pm. The workshop, conducted by the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency (CDERA) in collaboration with the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO), University of the West Indies (UWI) and Caricom Regional Organization for Standards and Quality (CROSQ), aims to develop a regional risk management framework for the tourism sector, geared at reducing the Caribbean’s susceptibility to disasters and improving the ability to benchmark natural disaster risk.
The project, financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), was launched in 2007 and will benefit IDB member countries in the region such as the Bahamas, Jamaica, The Dominican Republic, Turks & Caicos, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, and non-IDB members such as Barbados, St. Kitts & Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, amongst others.
Jamaica is one of five pilot countries to be hosting the developmental seminar and that will implement the project’s strategies by June 2010; the other countries are the Bahamas, Barbados, the Dominican Republic & the Turks & Caicos Islands. The workshop is geared towards all tourism stakeholders, disaster management practitioners, tourism trade associations, and persons from the tourism support services as well. The policy will provide standard operating procedures and guidelines for preparing for and recovering from natural disasters such as hurricanes; pandemic diseases and from man-made disasters such as terrorism.
Expert consultants from the CDERA will conduct two workshop sessions, assessing standards of the tourism sector; exploring opportunities and expectations for risk reduction and the methodology for the development and promotion of the application of the standards in the tourism sector. Participants will be placed in working groups according to their background and each group will analyze different topics which will be evaluated towards the end of the seminar.
The Caribbean’s vulnerability to natural disasters is great: geographically, the region is prone to disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tropical storms, flooding et al. When a disaster as such hits one of these developing countries, it takes a long while to pick up the pieces and get it back to where it used to be.
As a major employment provider in the Caribbean, the tourism sector is mostly dependent upon the natural surroundings as its product, the tourism sector is no different and arguably suffers greater than any other industry apart from agriculture. That said, it is also thought to be one of the most resilient sectors due to its ability to ‘bounce-back’ after natural disasters. With the current climate change issues, temperatures are expected to rise as well as the sea water levels, thus increasing the probability & magnitude of natural disasters, and increased spread of diseases across country borders.
It is important to note that Jamaica’s tourism sector has been actively implementing and operating within guidelines and has been working in collaboration with the ODPEM and other agencies in order to sensitize and promote better disaster risk management practices throughout the sector. The development of a regional disaster risk management strategy and plan of action calls for a more developed, in-depth and specific framework for the tourism sector. The Jamaican Ministry of Tourism is leading the drive to mainstream Disaster Risk Management into the tourism sector as it refines the framework from the regional level into a more defined national level.
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