Madrid, Spain – During the official proceedings of the 30th Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government, presided over by Spain’s King Felipe VI, Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader laid out a urgent, targeted call for scaled cross-national cooperation across all Ibero-American nations to upgrade early warning infrastructure and harmonize regional disaster risk management frameworks, as accelerating climate change drives more frequent and destructive extreme weather events across the Caribbean and Latin America. Abinader, whose small island Caribbean nation sits in one of the world’s most active hurricane corridors, emphasized that the Dominican Republic faces acute, recurring exposure to catastrophic storms, flood events and climate-fueled natural hazards that can wipe out decades of hard-won social and economic development gains in a matter of hours. Rejecting the notion that individual nations can build meaningful climate resilience in isolation, the head of state urged participating governments to formalize shared regional disaster prevention and rapid response mechanisms, including structured platforms to pool critical emergency resources, circulate technical expertise, and disseminate on-the-ground implementation best practices across the Ibero-American bloc. He framed the collective effort as a core act of cross-border solidarity, designed to shield vulnerable coastal and inland communities from preventable loss of life and livelihood, while drastically cutting the long-term societal and economic toll of climate-amplified natural disasters.
Abinader urges stronger early warning systems to confront climate threats
