By Kenton X. Chance
GENEVA (CMC) — The Vice President of Infrastructure at the World Bank, Guangzhe Chen, says ministries of finance and disaster risk management agencies in Latin America and the Caribbean face a challenge of breaking cycles as regards disaster risk reduction.
“The cycle is how to shift from reacting to disasters to planning for resilience. How do we use these scarce public resources, not only to recover but actually to reduce risk, and before disaster strikes again? And we know disaster will continue,” he said at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, which ends here on Friday.
Chen told an event focused on accelerating resilient development through risk-informed investment in the Americas and the Caribbean that the World Bank really believes that breaking the cycle starts with recognising that resilient infrastructure is not a luxury.
“… it’s a necessity for sustainable development and economic stabilities,” he said, adding that in the Caribbean and across Latin America, “infrastructure systems are the backbone of economy and community”.
He said that while this was not different from other parts of the world, in Latin America and the Caribbean, infrastructure is “highly exposed, often located in the coastal zone …and floodplain and seismic active areas.
“When this system fails, service will be disrupted, and jobs will be lost, and poverty will deepen, especially for those much more vulnerable,” Chen said.
He said this is why the World Bank is really working closely with countries in the region in four main areas, the first of which is integrating disaster risk reduction into infrastructure planning and public investment decisions.
“Second is retrofitting and reinforcing existing infrastructure where the risk is high. We learn from where disasters are prevalent and how we can mitigate that,” the senior World Bank official said.
The third area is a building-back-better approach to reconstruction after disasters.
“And the fourth and most critically is really to help governments to design with informed public finance strategies that will combine risk retention, risk transfer and preventive investments,” Chen said, adding that these are not theoretical.
“We’re actually doing that. We are seeing conflict results, whether through a parametric insurance facility in the Caribbean, resilient transport corridor in Central America, and climate-smart urban planning across South America.”
Chen said many of the disaster risk management programmes that the Washington-based financial institution has developed in Latin America are leaders across the different regions in the world.
“In fact, I myself was a manager for the disaster risk management programme at the World Bank some 15 years ago, and we developed some of those initiatives starting in Latin America,” he said.
He mentioned the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) that was formed in 2017 as the first multi-country risk pool in the world and the first insurance instrument to successfully develop parametric policies backed by both traditional and capital markets.
Chen said that the Catastrophe Deferred Drawdown Option (Cat DDO) in Central America has been pushed into the various parts of the world over the last 10 to 15 years.
He said the government of Costa Rica is mobilizing substantial investment collaboration with the World Bank and also other multilateral development banks for the resilient recovery infrastructure that is frequently damaged by disaster.
Honduras and the Dominican Republic are also investing in resilient reconstruction after the recent hurricanes.
“Through these actions, countries are making real progress in making their infrastructure much more resilient and breaking the vicious cycle of rebuilding in a way that’s recreating risk. That’s really what we want to break,” Chen said.
He said these efforts have been promoted and supported by policy instruments that are enhancing implementation capacity, noting the Cat DDO policy-based lending.
“But the scale of the risk is growing, and so must our ambition. The urgency is clear, and this is also global, regional and also immediate,” Chen said.
He urged that disaster risk reduction and financing infrastructure resilience not be viewed as a competing priority but as a core element of long-term economic planning and infrastructure development, and also important for social equities.
” We all have to work together because the cost of inaction is just simply too high,” he said, adding that the road to resilience must be paved with “proactive actions, strategic financing and also partnership.
“And I think this conference signifies that as well. Disaster reduction is not just a safeguard, it’s a smart investment for the future that eliminates uncertainty and paves the way for investment and creating jobs for sustainable development and shared prosperities.”
Chen said the World Bank stands with its client countries to “scale up investment reduce risk and protect life and livelihoods and share knowledge and build a safer and more resilient future for all of us”.
The Banks owned by the Whites gives loans with conditions you hire their approved companies to do the work on the projects you are borrowing money for. Ideally we want a no strings attached loan. We can’t forfeit our sovereignty and national interest for a loan with high interest rates which has the effect of crippling is financially