THE Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) in collaboration with the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) on Wednesday convened the first of a two-day Climate Smarting workshop intended to incorporate climate risk considerations into national disaster risk management planning.

The workshop, which focuses on enhancing Jamaica’s Country Work Programme, intends to highlight existing development challenges, vulnerabilities and future risks especially with regard to hydro-meteorological and other natural hazard events impacted by climate change.

ODPEM’s acting director general Richard Thompson noted that risk management and climate change were intertwined and were the focus of much international attention.

“We, as a country have embarked on a number of programmes and policies geared at disaster risk reduction. I know internationally there have been a lot of discussions as it relates to climate change and disaster risk reduction and whether the two are linked. In my estimation, a lot of the climate change adaptation programmes are in fact disaster risk reduction programmes and as a result of that, we are on the path to achieving what has been set out under our framework,” he said.

The sessions are a part of phase two of the Mainstreaming Climate Change and Disaster Management Project which is funded by the Austrian Development Agency and executed by CDEMA. Through the introduction of the CDEMA Guidance Tool (G Tool), the workshop also aims to highlight and recommend the strengthening of mechanisms for community resilience to mitigate, respond to and recover from the adverse effects of climate change and disasters. The G Tool outlines a process for ensuring that disaster risk management (DRM) plans and strategies of CDEMA member states are able to meet the challenges that will be posed by climate change.

“At the heart of the workshop is a visioning process whereby participants develop a consensual vision for the socio-economic development of Jamaica. They assess how climate change impacts could affect the realisation of this vision and identify what is needed in order to realise this vision in the face of climate variability and other climate impacts,” CDEMA workshop facilitator Kerry Ann Thompson said.

The meetings concluded yesterday with presentations from CDEMA representatives on climate change trends and consequences as well as the next step for implementation into the National Comprehensive Disaster Management Country Work Programme.