Barbados' Potential Benefits from CDRI Membership and Prime Minister Mia Mottley's Climate Leadership

Not only would Barbados benefit from membership of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) – a multi-stakeholder global partnership that seeks to build resilient infrastructure in participating countries – but Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s global recognition as a climate change leader

could encourage other Caribbean nations to follow the island’s lead.

Director General of the New Delhi-based CDRI Amit Prothi sees it as a win-win situation for Barbados and the multi-stakeholder coalition. Barbados is good for CDRI and CDRI is good for Barbados, he suggested in an interview with Barbados TODAY following a presentation on CDRI to 35 journalists from Latin America and the Caribbean who are on a tour of India.

“You have a prime minister who talks about [this kind of thing] on the global stage. She’s already got a global presence, so in a way, it makes sense for Barbados to be part [of the CDRI],” he said “Barbados has had its challenges. Island states are amongst the most vulnerable – that’s what she [Mottley] says – and the report that I shared [in the presentation] is also saying the same thing.”

The CDRI is a partnership of 39 national governments, along with seven organisations – United Nations agencies and programmes, multilateral development banks and financing mechanisms, the private sector, and knowledge institutions. It aims to promote the resilience of new and existing infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks in support of sustainable development.

In other words, it’s a platform in which members give and take – share their expertise where others can benefit and get assistance when they need it.

“We bring experiences, solutions, challenges across countries and across regions,” Prothi explained. “We’ve established technical assistance programmes which are grant funded, which basically say that if you in Barbados have a problem with flooding, we’ll bring you expertise from the other coalition members – not India necessarily; it could be Fiji, or Mauritius that has done something very well. The idea is that we bring the expertise to your country as well as you bring your expertise to other countries.

“So, if you’re a member, you have both access to technical assistance and also your technical capabilities are shared with other countries.”

CDRI is also now in the process of linking universities together, through the Infrastructure Resilience Academic eXchange (IRAX).

“It is about how universities are looking at new research and curriculum that is putting more emphasis on disaster risk management,” Prothi explained, adding that it is an initiative in which the University of the West Indies (UWI) could also get involved.

Among the members of CDRI – launched by Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi in September 2019 at the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit in New York – are the Caribbean nations of Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Haiti and Jamaica.

Prothi would like to see more countries from that side of the world expanding CDRI’s membership.

He acknowledged that if Prime Minister Mottley brings Barbados on board, others could soon follow.

“Absolutely. Coalition building is also about ‘oh my neighbour has joined, so why shouldn’t I?’ But also with her voice… there are a lot of linkages here we can explore,” the director general said, noting that France, whose President Emmanuel Macron co-chaired the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact –which focused on climate financing – with Mottley last June, will become co-chair of CDRI in April.

Membership of CDRI, which is free, gives member nations access to disaster response and recovery support; innovation, institutional and community capacity-building assistance; and standards and certification, among other benefits.

(DP)