SANTO DOMINGO — Climate and disaster resilience in the Dominican Republic can only be strengthened when territorial planning, disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, and infrastructure development are woven together into cohesive decision-making processes, leading climate and development experts have urged.
The call to action came from Max Puig, Executive Vice President of the Dominican Republic’s National Council for Climate Change and the Carbon Market (CNCCMC, by its Spanish acronym), during a closing panel discussion where project leaders presented the final outcomes of a multi-stakeholder resilience-building initiative. The five-year effort, titled “Territorial Planning and Comprehensive Risk Management to Increase Resilience to Disaster Mobility, Environmental Degradation and Climate Change in the Dominican Republic,” brought together national government agencies, local municipal authorities, and international partners to address gaps in the country’s climate preparedness.
Puig underscored that making climate and disaster risk data accessible at the local level is non-negotiable for building meaningful resilience. Scientific research and raw climate data, he argued, must be translated into practical, easy-to-use planning tools that local decision-makers can integrate directly into their territorial development strategies. He also pointed to the critical need for integrating cross-cutting data sets — including meteorological observations, territorial geographic information, and satellite remote sensing data — into existing early warning systems for extreme weather events, to give communities more time to prepare and respond.
Alba Goycoechea, Head of Mission for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in the Dominican Republic, added that the collaborative initiative has already helped deepen institutional coordination around one of the most underdiscussed links in climate action: the connection between climate change, human mobility, and territorial planning. As climate impacts displace communities across the country, well-informed territorial planning is key to accommodating climate migrants and reducing new risks that come from unplanned population movement. Goycoechea emphasized that sustaining the multi-sector partnerships built over the course of the project is essential to locking in the gains achieved and continuing the work of building safer, more adaptive communities across the country.
Domingo Matías, Deputy Minister of Territorial Planning for the Dominican Republic, confirmed that national policy is already shifting to center scientific information in all territorial planning work. Matías shared that new municipal-level studies tracking socioeconomic dynamics are currently in development, designed to help local planners monitor shifts in population distribution, economic activity, and community livelihoods that are driven or exacerbated by climate change.
Matías also highlighted one key outcome of the project: the Municipal Climate Change Vulnerability Index, a new tool that maps disparities across the country’s municipalities in terms of their exposure to climate hazards, their inherent sensitivity to those impacts, and their existing capacity to adapt. The index is intended to help policymakers allocate resources more effectively to the most at-risk communities.
To date, the project has already strengthened institutional and community capacity across three pilot provinces: Miches, Puerto Plata, and María Trinidad Sánchez. Work in these regions included updating local contingency plans for climate disasters, rolling out new territorial planning tools tailored to local risk profiles, and supporting community-led risk management initiatives that center local knowledge alongside national scientific data. Project leaders and participating stakeholders say the framework developed through the initiative will now be scaled to other regions of the country in the coming years.