The National Emergency Management Organization today held its second Early Warning Systems workshop with a focus to strengthen national preparedness and response mechanisms, within vulnerable communities most affected by natural disasters. We spoke with NEMO coordinator Daniel Mendez at the workshop about how this enhances disaster preparedness:
Daniel Mendez, NEMO Coordinator
"What we are doing here today is the first step in the implementation of the early warning for all initiative which is an intuitive led by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk reduction and the purpose of this is really and seeing how we can improve the early warning component of our work in Belize the ultimate aim is to ensure that globally every person has access to an early warning system by the year 2030 and we are in the process of implementing that project here in Belize."
"In terms of implementation what we have done is as follows, #1 we have done early warning assessment gap which is in a draft form so we have through the support of the UNDRR now have a better understanding of where we are our capacity to provide early warning to our people, a second component is the development of an implementation plan which is what we are doing here today looking at the gaps and seeing how we can take action as a society in our work for us to bridge those gaps and in order for us to be able to ensure that people are able to receive some sort of early warning when we are looking at different hazards."
