ROSE HALL, St James — The Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre (GTRCMC) is now the Global Tourism Resilience Centre (GTRC).

The change was announced by Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett on Saturday during the second and final day of Global Tourism Resilience Day Conference 2024. The event was held at the Montego Bay Convention Centre in St James under the theme of Navigating the Future of Tourism Resilience.

“As of today we are going to be rebranding the GTRCMC and it will be GTRC. We will be dropping the MC. It is a little long and does not make for the kind of reproduction that we want. So it will be the Global Tourism Resilience Centre in partnership with UN Tourism and that is going to be very critical,” stated Bartlett.

The GTRC is an international think tank headquartered at the Mona campus of The University of the West Indies (The UWI) in Jamaica, with offices in Africa, Canada, and the Middle East. It was founded in 2018 by Bartlett and is aimed at helping tourism stakeholders worldwide prepare for, manage, and recover from a crisis.

Several other centres are in the making. Among those to be established are Belize, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

Bartlett said that UN Tourism has fully embraced the centre and will make it a critical part of the global network of the UN system for tourism.

The World Tourism Organization (UN Tourism) is the United Nations agency, headquartered in Madrid, Spain, which is responsible for promoting responsible, sustainable, and universally accessible tourism.

Bartlett also announced the establishment of a Caribbean Tourism Academy, which will be supported by the UN as part of their global network. This will serve the region through its base in Jamaica.

Academies have already been established in Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Switzerland, among others. One is also to be established in Belize soon.

UNWTO Secretary General Zurab Pololikashvili said the next move is to create a Tourism Resilience Fund. He said this is currently being explored.

February 17 is celebrated worldwide as Global Tourism Resilience Day, an initiative of Bartlett which was given full support by Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who took the resolution to the United Nations in 2022.

“On February 6 of 2023, we had 94 countries signing and endorsing the resolution to declare that day in the world,” stated Bartlett, who thanked Holness, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Senator Kamina Johnson Smith, and others.

Bartlett said the Global Tourism Resilience Day Conference will to be held every other year in Jamaica. There had been suggestions for it to be an annual event; however, Bartlett said the bi-yearly format will allow for other countries to benefit, in-between, from the staging.

For her part, Johnson Smith noted the impact of climate change on developing countries and particularly small island developing states (SIDS) in the Caribbean and Pacific, underscoring that our vulnerability has increased tremendously and the global responses to support adaptation and vindication are woefully inadequate.

She noted that countries which have contributed so little to the emission of greenhouse gasses are disproportionately impacted with little room for manoeuvring.

“We are vigilant and we must participate in the deliberation of the conference of the parties in the framework of the convention of climate change,” stated Johnson Smith.

“We also strongly believe that as we advance and advocate on matters such as loss and damage and the importance of identifying funding to help vulnerable countries to adopt and mitigate, our participation in discussions such as those taking place at this conference and those in other forums must consistently carry the message of concern, supported by a global commitment to action.“

At the end of May, SIDS will meet in Antigua and Bermuda for the fourth international conference at which focus will be placed on issues affecting states.

“The agenda is driven by the need for action to be taken to support the achievement of the sustainable development goals, with a focus on our particular circumstances. There is no doubt that the interest in building resilience in tourism must find a place in those deliberations,” stated Johnson Smith.

The two-day conference ended Saturday night with a Global Tourism Resilience awards ceremony at which a mix of entities, personalities and countries were lauded.