The Caribbean Strengthens in Response to Extreme Weather Events

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction are seeking to invest US$7 million this year to improve protection and coping strategies for natural disasters in the Caribbean region.

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This will help strengthen the national strategies of each country in the area and ensure fewer losses in human lives and economic resources.

If such an initiative could be carried out, the methodologies and equipment that support the national meteorological and hydrological services would be improved, in order to increase and improve the understanding of climate change and the disasters it generates. This would contribute to a better functioning of early warning systems.

This is the first step in achieving this objective, for which marked interest is placed in the elaboration, development and design phase of the initiative. The international nature of the project requires the creation of an inclusive and flexible framework that allows comprehensive and functional coordination of all the early warning systems that the training project will reach.

The Caribbean is a region highly vulnerable to natural disasters, not only because it is located in an area of the planet very active in extreme weather events, but also because it has a weak macroeconomic structure, which does not allow them to apply all the current developments in science and technology to face and prevent them.

Developing economies, many of them small islands in the middle of one of the most unstable seas, the Caribbean Sea, with low incomes, in some cases marked by insecure or unstable political and social environments. The confluence of all these problems directly affects the level of impact of meteorological phenomena in the Caribbean, which each year causes many losses of human lives and millions of dollars in economic damage.

The new initiative supported by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) aims at filling these gaps and begin a path of strengthening and developing the sector.

According to a new report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), temperatures in the region have risen by an average of 0.2 °C per decade over the past 30 years, the highest rate ever recorded. This increase has triggered a series of extreme events that have seriously affected the region's population and economy.

WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas noted that tropical cyclones, intense rainfall and flooding, as well as severe multi-year droughts, have caused loss of life and multi-billion dollar economic damage through 2022. However, this is not over yet. Rising sea levels and warming oceans pose increasing risks to livelihoods, ecosystems and coastal economies.