PRIME Minister (PM) Brigadier (Ret’d), Mark Phillips is attending the 14th Council of Ministers of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) meeting at the Beachcombers Hotel in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Prime Minister Phillips, responsible for disaster management in Guyana, is accompanied by Colonel (Ret’d) Nazrul Hussain, the Director-General of the Civil Defence Commission.

The Ministry of National Security, on behalf of the Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, is hosting the meeting, which brings together the ministers of disaster management of CDEMA’s 20 participating states across the Caribbean region. The main objective of the 14th Council of Ministers meeting is to secure the policy-level decisions required for the effective functioning of the CDEMA system.

The CDEMA is a regional inter-governmental agency for disaster management in CARICOM. Its mission is to support member states by promoting disaster risk reduction and management to enhance resilience, offering resources and frameworks to handle natural disasters and impacts of climate change, especially hurricanes, floods, and other extreme events affecting the Caribbean.

In addition to the Council of Ministers meeting, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) will join forces with CDEMA and the National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO) of St. Vincent and the Grenadines to convene the third edition of the Ivan + 20 Resilience Dialogue. The dialogue began in Jamaica in June of this year and a second session took place in Grenada in October. In 2007, CCRIF was formed as the first global multi-country risk pool.