Haiti’s President Jovenel Moise tells CARICOM confront climate change together in a position of strength

​Haiti’s President Jovenel Moise tells CARICOM Heads to confront climate change together from a position of strength.  He also wants a new mechanism for disaster risk funding that would assist affected Member States to quickly recover and reconstruct. The thinking behind the call for a new mechanism was to ensure that funds for reconstruction are channeled through “affordable and effective procedures, rather than be paralyzed by the expectation of unlikely assistance, which in most cases is too little, comes too late and, sometimes, never happens”.
 
The President of Haiti who is the current Chairman of CARICOM, addressed the opening ceremony of the Twenty-Ninth Intersessional Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM in Port-au-Prince on Monday, and placed great emphasis on climate change, natural disasters and funding for recovery. He advised that he was organizing an international conference aimed at strengthening the mechanisms of resilience to the effects of climate change, and the management of natural disasters in the Caribbean.
 
“This will be an opportunity for the States, partners and international development actors to exchange ideas and make proposals on the best features of prevention and responses to natural disasters. Without your full participation, this conference will not be successful. You are, already, invited,” he said.
 
In his address President Moise said he was assuming the Chairmanship of the Community, at a time when it was grappling with the effects of extreme weather caused by global warming. The “sometimes permanent damage and losses” that were consequences of natural disasters slowed the socio-economic development of countries in the Region, and prevented them from achieving sustainable development goals, he said.
 
No stranger to devastation from natural disasters, Haiti is still suffering the effects of the massive 2010 earthquake that killed about 300 000 people, left a similar number injured and more than a million and a half displaced. It continues to be affected by natural weather phenomena including floods and hurricanes.
 
Disaster Management and Recovery is among the matters the Heads of Government are deliberating on, during their two-day Meeting.