BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC):

The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency (CDERA) and the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility on Wednesday signed an agreement aimed at strengthening the region's resilience to hazards posed by natural disasters.

Both parties said the memorandum of understanding (MOU) will help countries of the region provide access to "real-time hurricane hazard and impact information and to assist governments to better understand risk financing".

CDERA coordinator, Jeremy Collymore, said the MOU "provides an opportunity for providing our constituencies with the type of knowledge and information essential to build a culture of safety and resilient development practices necessary for sustainable development in this region".

New initiatives

The agreement also promotes and introduces new initiatives to assist Caribbean governments in understanding and financing catastrophic risk exposure, as well as the sharing of information on the hazards, which Collymore described as being "opportune" in light of the present-day challenges faced by governments in the region.

"The issue of recovery financing is amplified when we recognise the precarious economic situation of many of our participating states in this recession environment. When we add the climate change scenario that portends more frequent high magnitude events, the necessity of proactive considerations of risk financing becomes inevitable," he said.