Geographic Focus – Geographic – Specific

 

Although the above described areas of action covered the entire Hemisphere, specific projects are tailored to geographic-specific needs. In that way, based on the pressing issues, institutional and socio-economic conditions existing in the various regions of the Hemisphere, projects and actions are being developed to address priority issues and provide adequate solutions. When designing a project or an action, also, replicability and regionalization criteria are applied, as to build experience and practices that can be up-scale and further transferred to other communities, countries and regions. While projects are designed to target communities and countries, they are developed with a regional approach as to optimize the scarce resources, develop multi-country cooperation schemes and agreements, and design comprehensive solutions.

 The DSD-NHRRP is constantly reviewed and updated as to take into consideration on-going and planned efforts, changes in priority settings and thematic emphasis, and changes that result from a live environment.

 Currently, efforts in the Caribbean are geared towards supporting the Comprehensive Disaster Management (CDM) Strategy and Framework, led by CDERA. Specific actions in that region include: (i) strengthening the capacity to enhance legal and institutional frameworks related to the state of emergency and resource appropriation; (ii) increasing resilience of physical infrastructure, particularly, in housing; and (iii) application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to disaster mitigation, looking at the connectivity of data and information produced by High Tech Satellite Earth Observation Systems and local community-based EWS and risk management.

In the case of the Central American Isthmus, the focus is on increasing the resilience of the educational sector –school building codes and standards; as well as in developing adaptive measures to Climate Change and Climate Variability, taking the Water Basin as the planning and management unit. More specifically, a Regional Platform for the implementation of a Program on Small Valley Flood Alert and Vulnerability Reduction is under consideration. In addition, and within the scope of efforts toward increasing local community resilience, the DSD-NHRRP supports the application of Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment (VCA) methodologies in local communities.

In the case of the Andean Community, the DSD-NHRRP is exploring ways to support the development of adaptive capacity to climate variability, and particularly, extreme events resulting from ENSO phenomena. Likewise the Caribbean and the Central American Isthmus, ICT applied to natural disaster mitigation are being explored as to identify gaps in information and tools to bring timely and accurate information to local communities for managing their risk, provide early warning, and prevent disasters.

The DSD-NHRRP is exploring opportunities for collaboration with the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, GEOSS, an initiative of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) of the United States, jointly implemented by nine countries of the Americas, Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, and the US. The DSD-NHRRP plans to support this effort in expanding the system to other OAS member states, and using the INDM as a tool to further share this information. Initial contacts have been made with National Commission for Space Activities (CONAE,) of Argentina, and the National Institute of Air and Space Research (INPE,) of Brazil. These later institutions support Satellite Earth Observation Systems, covering all South America and part of Central America and the Caribbean, and providing geo-referenced imagery for natural disaster mitigation applications.

 

 

 

This page was last updated on Wednesday September 29, 2010.