And Dr Williams didn't even get a chance get comfortable in his new office before he was thrust into disaster relief in areas of the country that were affected by two hurricanes. As the new CEO of the Climate Change and Disaster Risk management ministries, he has his work cut out for him, and we asked him about the plans for the first half of the year.
Dr. Kenrick Williams - CEO, Ministry of Sustainable Development "Disaster risk of course is a major component of what we do an the unprecedented floods and natural events have really shown us that we invest in the systems and mechanism, our response system, our preparedness system, so we need to strengthen that was a part of the government in the next 100 days, putting in the proper systems for that. We have seen now the impact of climate change and again mainstreaming climate change within our various sectors, so we have to look at the mitigation as well as the adaptation component of climate change across our various economic sectors. So those are key things that we're going to be looking at and then the sustainable development component is ensuring that as we develop, as we plan that we consider those multidimensional approaches to sustainable development. So no longer we're just building a road because we need, no longer we're investing in tourism facilities because they make sense, we have to look at the multidimensional impacts of those investments of economic development."
Reporter "In the first 6 months how are we preparing for the hurricane season?"
Dr. Kenrick Williams "Like I said, the first thing we have to do is build our response mechanisms, we have to train our staff properly, we have to do the proper assessments, we have to our proper data collection, resilience mapping, impact mapping, hazard mapping and so currently what is happening on the ground is that we put together a task force that is doing those analysis. I think a lot of times we're very reactive to these disasters and impact of these disasters. What we've come in to do immediately is to say listen and the Hon. Prime Minister and the Cabinet has said we need to do the proper resilience assessment and hazard assessments and impact assessments so that we know when we have a flood event, when we severe wind event as part of the hurricane, then we know ow we can respond. We have an idea of where the impacts will be, what communities will be affected, what areas will be affected and so we are prepared and so we're really scaling up the disaster preparedness component before we even think about responding."
Once these assessments are done, Dr Williams says they will then work alongside the Ministry of Infrastructure Development and various village and town councils to work with the area most at risk.
