14 PHASES OF THE DISASTER CYCLE KEY PROCESSES, PROCEDURES & SYSTEMS MITIGATION • Vulnerability and Risk Assessment • Hazard Mapping • Updated Legislation • Planning for Persons with Special Needs • Comprehensive Land use Planning • Modernised Building Codes • Insurance • Design and construction of key public infrastructure • Sea Defences • Environmental Monitoring and Management • Policy Clarity – comprehensive • Gender Sensitive Preparedness Plans • Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) • Mutual Aid Agreements • Commitments to CDEMA – strategic and operational • Resource allocations • Well built and equipped Emergency Operations Centres PREPAREDNESS • Well appointed and well-staffed National Disaster Offices • Public Awareness and Information Dissemination • Emergency Broadcast Systems • Emergency Warehouses and stockpiles • Training for key personnel • Maintenance of Key Infrastructure • Regular Simulation Exercises • Effective Emergency Telecommunications • Precautionary Evacuations • Tracing systems for victims and affected persons • Search and Rescue Capacity • Emergency Medical Response Capacity • Impact, Damage and Needs Assessment • Restoration of Essential Services • Emergency Shelter and other Accommodation Arrangements RESPONSE • Security and Safety Arrangements • Management of Relief Programmes • Information Dissemination • Emergency Repairs to Buildings and other Facilities • Disease, Vector and Vermin Control Programmes • Arrangements for Mass burials – if required • Debris Consolidation and Removal • Clean ups • Emergency Transport and Traffic Arrangements • Effective Communications Systems • Crisis Counselling RECOVERY, RECONSTRUCTION & REHABILITATION • Policy Redefinition and Adaptation • Long-term Debt Management • Long-term Aid Management • Management of Recovery Services • Restoration and Revival of Livelihoods and Economic Activities • Restoration of Utilities • Longer-term Social Assistance Programmes • Housing Solutions • Restorative Construction of Essential Infrastructure • Coastal Zone Repairs and New Construction • Reforestation • Continued from previous page PREPARE, PERFORM, TRANSFORM Public sector managers must make a sustained and concerted effort to understand the risks that the combined forces of Climate Change and storms will bring to our Region. Adopt a holistic perspective. Managers must take on the responsibility of leading the charge for readiness and resilience by following an approach such as what we have laid out above. Incorporate agreed actions in Strategic, Operational and Work Plans. Monitor, assess, review and realign each year, as changing circumstance unfold. Managers must see that transformative changes for resilience become embedded in the work culture of their organisations specifically and the public service in general. CARICAD hopes that readers who have professional and social relationships with our policy makers will continue to make the case for urgent policy and strategy action because Climate Change in concert with storms and hurricanes is already presenting us with its many negative effects. Those could become long-term impacts unless holistic, concerted action is taken now. KEY SOURCES OF INFORMATION & REFERENCES FOR THIS ARTICLE • How Climate Change makes Hurricanes More Destructive – Environmental Defence Fund 2024 • A Force of nature: Hurricanes in a Changing Climate – Angel Colbert (Phd), NASA • Atlantic hurricanes are Getting More Dangerous More Quickly – Brian Handwerk, 2023 • Climate Change Makes Cyclones More Intense and Destructive, Scientists Say – Agence France Press 2023 • Mental Health and Climate: Policy Brief – WHO 2022
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