IDB workshop on Guyana disaster risks concludes

Several professionals representing various government agencies, NGOs, utility service providers and the University of Guyana benefited from the Civil Defence Commission (CDC)/IDB final workshop on country risk disaster indicators and flood risk evaluation which opened on Monday at the Regency Hotel in Georgetown.
The four-day forum consisted of the workshop which was held on June 11 and 12 followed by specialised “hands-on” two-day training session, on June 13 and 14 at the CDC headquarters.
According to a CDC release, at the opening ceremony of the workshop, CDC Director General retired Colonel Chabilall Ramsarup explained that the workshop marks the culmination of a key component of the IDB project entitled, Design and Implementation of an Integrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRM) plan.
He said the project was designed to evaluate climate-related disaster risk, strengthen national local capacity for IDRM and to support the future implementation of the IDRM plan through the design of an investment programme in flood prevention and mitigation.
According to him, component one, under which the workshop falls, consists of the application of four IDB Indicators of Disaster Risk and Risk Management to Guyana and a comprehensive probabilistic evaluation of flood risk in Guyana. The four indicators are a Disaster Deficit Index (DDI), a local Disaster Index (LDI) the Prevalent Vulnerability Index (PVI) and the Risk management Index (RMI). The risk evaluation is expected to incorporate climate variability and change and identify geographical areas and sectors at risk to floods; probable maximum losses to public and private assets, including economic impacts; and institutional capacity to manage risk. The results from the work under this component are expected to provide useful information for sectoral planning and overall development planning.
The consultant recruited for this project was Natural Disaster Risk Assessment- Latin America, popularly known by the Spanish acronym (ERN) whose work began in December 2010 with an inception workshop where the IDB risk indicators were introduced to representatives of key ministries/agencies. An interim workshop on ERN’s preliminary findings was held in October 2011.
The CDC director general indicated that, a number of challenges were encountered with the main one being the availability of information required for the various analyses as well as the format in which it existed.  The objectives of this final workshop are to present and discuss the results of the IDB system of indicators of disaster risk and risk management, the flood risk assessment (probabilistic) for the coastal plain of Guyana, the result of losses on the analysed portfolios (housing and agriculture), available financial instruments for protection against natural catastrophes and the results of the assessment of the institutional capacity to manage risk and economic resilience of Guyana.
The presentations and discussions are being led by the ERN team leader Dr Omar Cardona and his team. The intensive “hands-on training on June 13 and 14 will focus on the Comprehensive Approach to Probabilistic Risk Assessment (CAPRA) tools and their use in generating risk maps using the database developed from component one of the IDB project.