Regional partners for disaster management coordinate
When the hurricane season opened three weeks ago, disaster management and preparedness became priority one for many Belizeans. And while most family evacuation routes and emergency supplies are ready, this week local officials are meeting with their regional counterparts to ensure that when disaster strikes, government, civil and business partners lead a coordinated response. This morning Coordinator of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency Jeremy Collymore; David Smith, General Secretary of the Centre for the Coordination for the Prevention of National Disasters in Central America, and Belize’s Lt. Colonel George Lovell from the National Emergency Management Organization chaired a meeting in Belize City to devise strategy and implementation techniques.
Jeremy Collymore, CDERA
“We are not creating new things. We are looking at effective ways to share the capacity, to minimize the learning curve for those persons who want to start. And that is going to be the spirit in which we are going to form this cooperation. Central America has a very good experience on seismic activity and that kind of monitoring and so on and we want to learn from that. Also, they have a political system where the disaster management processes are integrated into the presidencies and the issues that they face. Ours is coming from the other side and going up so we want to see how we can mix these different approaches and get a more effective way for sustainable commitment to the reduction of the losses that we are seeing far too often in these regions.”
David Smith, CEPREDENAC
“Major issues from the Central American perspective: institutional strengthening. We still have weak institutionalization. For example, every change of government we have a serious loss of experience of personnel, we have to be rebuilding. We have training and documents and whatsoever agreements but when we come to assessing outcomes, we are still very poor in results, specific results. So this has already been screened. We know what it is. Now our challenge is to overcome this.”
Lt. Colonel George Lovell, Coordinator, NEMO
“What will happen is we have a presentation that will be given by CEPREDENAC and CDERA and those information that they present is basically is a cooperation framework for us to do joint cooperation between regions. And I’m hoping that what is presented will be looked at by the wider participants and their comments and suggestions will help us to refine what is being presented by the two agencies.”
While Belize is an official member of CDERA, it enjoys observer status in CEPREDENAC.
