As the Caribbean faces a rapidly evolving landscape of cascading climate threats and shifting social vulnerabilities, the region’s top disaster management authority has issued an urgent call for a fundamental rethink of how governments and communities prepare for and respond to crises. The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) is pushing for a bold pivot from outdated reactive response models to a new, people-centered framework of anticipatory risk management that matches the growing complexity of modern hazards.
In her keynote address to CDEMA’s annual Comprehensive Disaster Management conference, Executive Director Elizabeth Riley argued that traditional approaches to disaster management have been rendered obsolete by 25 years of dramatic social and environmental change. Pointing to the Caribbean’s long-standing status as one of the world’s most hazard-prone regions – a dynamic she described as a “living laboratory for climate and geological risk” – Riley highlighted the $12.2 billion in damages and losses from Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica as a stark example of the region’s ongoing vulnerability.
Yet Riley also emphasized that the Caribbean has long been a global pioneer in progressive disaster risk governance. Decades ago, regional leaders recognized that protecting populations, preserving livelihoods and safeguarding hard-won development gains required moving beyond responding to disasters after they strike to proactively managing risk before impacts occur. That forward-thinking philosophy gave rise to the region’s landmark Comprehensive Disaster Management (CDM) framework, which will mark its 25th anniversary in 2026. Built on a whole-of-society principle, the CDM strategy rests on the core idea that resilient communities are the foundation of resilient nations.
Despite the framework’s early successes, Riley warned that both the region and the threats it faces have transformed beyond recognition since the CDM was first launched. Demographic shifts are rapidly reshaping the social fabric of Caribbean nations: the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean projects that by 2050, one in four Caribbean residents will be aged 60 or older, creating new layers of vulnerability for communities navigating extreme weather. Compounding these demographic changes are growing societal challenges including rising violent crime, shifting migration patterns and escalating geopolitical tensions, all of which introduce new interconnected risks that were largely unaccounted for in older disaster management models.
Most critically, climate change has rewritten the rules of disaster preparedness entirely. Where hazards once occurred in isolation, today’s climate-driven threats are increasingly cascading and compounding, creating overlapping crises that overwhelm traditional response systems. Recent high-profile storms have exposed fatal gaps in long-held assumptions about disaster preparedness, Riley explained. During Hurricane Melissa, pre-existing hazard maps failed to anticipate the devastating convergence of a 14-foot storm surge and more than 20 inches of simultaneous intense rainfall, turning a predictable event into an unprecedented catastrophe. Even more striking was Hurricane Beryl, which made history as the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. Beryl upended the region’s long-held understanding of hurricane season timelines: for decades, planners operated on the assumption that there was a gradual ramp-up to the September peak, giving communities time to prepare after the June season start. Beryl’s early arrival proved that this timeline is no longer valid, and that preparedness must be a year-round priority.
Another persistent, underaddressed gap that Riley highlighted is the critical disconnect between early warning systems and community action. She referenced the 2019 Hurricane Dorian disaster in the Bahamas, where the Bahamas Meteorological Service issued flawless forecasts and clear evacuation orders days before the storm made landfall – yet many residents still chose not to leave their homes. To close this gap, Riley argued that disaster management authorities need to integrate insights from behavioral science to better understand how communities perceive risk and why people make the choices they do during crises. If risk communication fails to trigger life-saving action, she said, the entire approach to outreach must be re-evaluated.
To address these interconnected challenges, Riley is calling for a structural overhaul of community-level disaster governance. She questioned whether the region can continue to rely exclusively on traditional volunteer-led frameworks, such as Barbados’ long-standing district emergency organisations (DEOs), noting that volunteer systems often break down under the pressure of catastrophic, long-duration disasters. “Volunteers are the glue that holds our disaster management system together, and they deserve tangible support and formal recognition for their work,” Riley said, “but we have to ask whether it is time to integrate community resilience arrangements into the paid, structured mechanisms of government to ensure sustained capacity during crises.”
Riley also highlighted the critical role of cutting-edge technology in strengthening the region’s anticipatory risk management. Tools including high-resolution geospatial analytics and “digital twins” – virtual community-scale models that can simulate a wide range of future climate scenarios – are already being deployed to map emerging hazards, including the increasingly frequent extreme prolonged heatwaves that have become a major silent killer across the Caribbean. Partially funded by the European Union, these tools, paired with the new Caribbean Community Risk Information Tool (CCRIT), will give local planners far more accurate data to prepare for hazards that have never been seen in recorded history.
Closing her address to conference delegates, Riley issued a clear call to action: if attendees leave the conference willing to challenge long-held assumptions about what community resilience means and what it must become in the face of a changing climate, and renew their commitment to shared responsibility and people-centered resilience building, it will mark a monumental step forward for securing the Caribbean’s future. “Placing people at the absolute center of our risk management work is not just a moral imperative – it is the only way to build a resilient Caribbean that can thrive amid uncertainty,” Riley emphasized.
