Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre to help industries rebound
MONTEGO BAY, St James — Prime Minister Andrew Holness has expressed keen interest in the Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre which was launched at the Montego Convention Centre last week, citing that apart from tourism, it could provide the template for other sectors to bounce back in the wake of disasters.
“I am very interested in the work that is going to be done at the resilient centre, not just for tourism, but more importantly what lessons other industries learn about the speed of recovery after a disaster and building protocols to ensure that we have resistance and sustainability,” Holness said.
First announced during the United Nations World Tourism Organization Global Conference on sustainable tourism in St James in November 2017, the centre, conceived by Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett, is the first of its kind and is tasked with creating, producing and generating toolkits, guidelines and policies to handle the recovery process following a disaster.
Based at the Mona campus of The University of the West Indies, the facility will include a sustainable tourism observatory, which will assist with preparedness, management and recovery from disruptions that impact tourism.
Holness argued that the safety of a destination comes down to many threats such as local crime, global terrorism and the threat of war.
“But one that is emerging in a serious way that we have to pay attention to, which many Caribbean countries may not be totally prepared for, is that of cybersecurity,” Holness argued.
“Because it is not seen so much as a physical threat sometimes governments underestimate it and certainly in the region far more work needs to be done on the issue.”
He stressed the importance of paying close attention to the cyber frontier, because global travel is strongly dependent on the exchange of information, “so the data of the travelling person is vitally important”.
“It’s vitally important for the efficient operations of the ports or the operations and the provision of services and if that data is not protected, gets into the wrong hands, or is stolen, or used in nefarious ways; then you could virtually cripple the industry,” Holness argued.
