CHARIM

The Caribbean region is regularly hit by a variety of natural disasters due to its geographic location in an area where floods, hurricanes and earth quakes occur frequently. This is causing loss of lives and a lot of material damage. The national governments of the small island states (i.e. Belize, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Granada) have limited human and financial resources to cope with these disasters and generally lack the expertise for hazard and risk assessment in their territories. The World Bank has initiated the Caribbean Risk Information Program and as part of this program ITC has taken up the role for capacity development to expand the capabilities of staff in relevant government agencies responsible for planning and infrastructure. 

A consortium led by ITC is implementing the capacity building component of this project, in close cooperation with the University of West Indies, AIT (Bangkok), and the University of Bristol. Besides conducting a number of training workshops country-specific procedures were developed for the collection, analysis and management of relevant data. Frameworks were developed for landslide and flood hazard and risk assessment, and handbooks were developed on methodologies, use cases and data management. A geonode was setup that contains all spatial information collected and developed in the project for the countries.

All the efforts resulted in a platform where relevant resources are available in three linked on-line handbooks.

Contact persons

dr. D. Alkema

Project leader

dr. D. Alkema

Project officer

Global impact

Disaster resilience

Our exposure and vulnerability to extreme events - including both natural and human-induced hazards - continue to increase. Worldwide the impact of disasters is rapidly growing. At ITC, experts work to integrate hazard assessment and disaster risk management into strategic planning and sustainable development.

Show more