KINGSTOWN, St Vincent: Inadequate resourcing, not the absence of preparedness and response plans, has been blamed for much of the devastation caused by disasters across the region and the world. This is according to Jeremy Collymore, coordinator of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency (CDERA). He expressed the view that disaster management in the region requires more sustained commitment of decision makers at all levels. Collymore said this appeared to have been the case in New Orleans as in the Caribbean. “What is clear in every instance is that the cost of mitigating the vulnerability is inordinately less than that of financing the recovery,” Collymore observed. The Barbadian national made the observation while delivering remarks at a ceremony to official open the National Emergency Management Office’s (NEMO) Headquarters and Emergency Operation Centre in Kingstown on Friday. He said more attention needed to be paid to the welfare of the region’s first responders to disasters and said this was one of the “emerging lessons that must be seized by all”. He said the emergence of purpose-built National Emergency Operations Centres (NEOCs) in the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency (CDERA) community can be said to be driven by the recognition that effective post-disaster management requires some infrastructure to support the essential command and control functions of emergency operations. He was pleased that an initiative launched ten years ago, to promote effective planning, design and management of NEOCs was beginning to bear fruit. At lease seven of the CDERA participating states have NEOCs and another eight have advanced plans for doing so, Collymore reported. He however cautioned that a NEOC was a necessary but not sufficient condition for effective disaster operations management. Collymore noted that whilst losses as a result of disaster have been overwhelming for the region it has been minimal in the context of the global picture. He said this has serious implication for the scope of post-impact recovery grants. “We must therefore invest as much as possible in reducing our vulnerability whilst improving our resilience,” he advised. “We are not asking that disaster management be seen as special but rather to encourage this reality in the politico-economic space in which we operate,” he said. Collymore, on behalf of CDERA presented SVG’s NEMO Coordinator Howie Prince with a satellite phone. Reprinted from Caribbean Net News caribbeannetnews.com