HEAD of the Disaster Risk Reduction, Recovery and Resilience Building Team in the Crisis Bureau of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Jamaican Ronald Jackson has urged the Caribbean to look to Japan for best practices in disaster resilience, risk reduction, and recovery.

Sharing his views during a recent sit-down with University of Technology, Jamaica President Dr Kevin Brown, Jackson pointed out that the island nation of Japan in East Asia faces several of the same hazards as Caribbean nations.

Jackson — whose team leads the global effort to help countries better anticipate, prepare for, and recover from disasters — said Japan’s investments in dealing with its seismic risks have earned them platinum standard as far as the UNDP is concerned.

“We like to look at Japan because they’re an island. They face some of the same hazards we face — the seismic, the tropical cyclones, they have all of them — and they have really invested in resilience…and it has been part of what also spurred their economy onward, and they are exporting these types of practice[s] as well to the globe,” Jackson told Brown.

“If you look at … when an earthquake happens in Japan, people are not running out of the buildings. By and large they are staying where they are and they are able to continue the activities in that building because they have retrofitted, they have built buildings to seismic codes.

“They have engineered a lot of the foundations to be able to cope with the moments that the building goes to twisting, torquing, and et cetera,” added Jackson as he pointed out that Japan has also invested heavily in preparedness.

“If you go, you will see little children in their yellow helmets, green helmets, being taken on tours. So at an early age they’re indoctrinated to understand risk and to manage risk, so we look to them as sort of the platinum standard, so to speak,” Jackson pointed out.

He said many other countries, including China and India, are investing heavily in their resilience and risk reduction agenda.

“It’s a long journey but they are pumping resources into now beginning to deal with this particular challenge as they go forward,” Jackson noted.

He pointed out that Jamaica could also be seen as a space where the globe has learned from its interventions but argued that some practices which have been abandoned need to be revived.

“We have moments where we have stepped forward and we have stepped back. You talk about risk-layering as one means, which is putting in the sort of financial protection. Jamaica is being hailed for that so we can identify approaches. In Jamaica we have had experiences where we have done planned relocation as a means of reducing risk and vulnerability — that’s a good practice. We have gone away from those things. We need to go back to some of these tried and tested methods,” Jackson declared.

Jackson, who before his posting at the UNDP served as executive director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, and before that as director general of Jamaica’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management, said he is troubled about the impact decisions which are now being made at the global level will have on Jamaica.

“The anatomy of risk includes things like poverty. So as those decisions that are being made globally — particularly as we even look at this question around artificial intelligence and the implication it will have on jobs, in a context where we already have challenges in being able to provide the amount of economic opportunities for the people of the region — I think that’s one issue that concerns me,” Jackson said.