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Strengthening resilience and coping capacities in the Caribbean through integrated early warning systems Programme
Strengthening resilience and coping capacities in the Caribbean through integrated early warning systems Programme
January 7, 2019
| The project ‘Strengthening resilience and coping capacities in the Caribbean through integrated early warning systems,’ was aimed at reducing the vulnerability of communities facing multiple natural hazard risks in Caribbean small islands. This was to be achieved by helping communities become better informed about natural hazards and their vulnerabilities. This was to be completed by implementing a system to allow automated receipt of hazard notifications and dissemination of alerts, via an integrated Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) based, all hazard Early Warning System. The project builds towards UNDP’s focus of strengthening community and national resilience through improving the early warning systems (EWS) across the region. This focus started through the EU-funded Regional Risk Reduction Initiative (R3I), which as one of its components developed a CAP based EWS in four overseas countries and territories. Through, the ECHO-funded Community Alerts Project 2013-2014, UNDP Barbados and the OECS expanded the countries with CAP-based EWS by three to include Dominica, Grenada and St. Vincent. The current project added Barbados and St Lucia to the existing network of CAP based EWS and sought to create an enabling environment for other countries in the region to facilitate the adoption of CAP EWS through: ● Systemisation of the process ● Adding two (Barbados and Saint Lucia) additional territories to the Caribbean network of established all-hazard CAP-based EWS ● Upscaling of end-to-end automated CAP systems The objective of the project was to strengthen national preparedness mechanisms through improved hazard monitoring and alert dissemination, targeting vulnerable communities and groups; and create a regional framework for facilitating multi-hazard CAP EWS. Summary of the Evaluation’s Conclusions: The design of the project was well thought out. It had components pertaining to pilot / demonstration (outcome 2 and outcome 3), aimed to produce replications by creating a framework and developed case studies for knowledge sharing (outcome 1). The project could not achieve the objective of obtaining commitments from other Caribbean countries regarding implementation of CAP EWS. Getting the national governments to commit to CAP EWS requires a persistent campaign to the target audiences and decision makers by engaging them directly, which was missing from the project design |
