scholarly journals EVOLUTION OF REGIONAL RESPONSE PREPAREDNESS IN THE WIDER CARIBBEAN THROUGH RAC/REMPEITC-CARIBE: ENHANCING A LONG TERM CYCLE

2008 ◽  
Vol 2008 (1) ◽  
pp. 1117-1122
Author(s):  
Benjamin Couzigo ◽  
Brian Peter ◽  
Herbert Silonero

ABSTRACT RAC/REMPEITC-Caribe is a United Nation'S Regional Activity Centre, established in 1994 by the International Maritime Organization and the United Nations Environment Program for the Caribbean Sea. The Centre exists to assists countries in the Wider Caribbean region and Latin America to prevent and respond to major oil pollution incidents. While developing a systematic approach to capacity building, resulting in comprehensive regional projects including the Caribbean Islands Regional OPRC Plan and the Central America CAOP Project (design to establish a Central America Regional OPRC Plan), the constant interaction of the Centre within the region with the various cultures of response preparedness, regularly raises the following questions:– How to improve a standard, constant, and effective system for capacity building in regards to contingency planning?– How to improve the co-operation between the regional partners?– How to define a better mechanism for funding? The analysis of the last ten years activities developed by the Centre shows the alternation of established priorities developed under the objectives of the strategic plan for enhancing regional response preparedness. Key components for the definition of a long term development cycle, required to build capacity, and enhance regional co-operation, are identified. The elements to stand out are:– the development of a constructive succession in the activities thematic;– a time frame of 5 years to complete a cycle for a regional centre with RAC/REMPEITC characteristics;– the key role of metrics to assess priorities for the cycle;– the need of a common overview of the process to facilitate co-operation / co-ordination;– the need of sustained commitment. The identification of those parameters allow a regional centre to clarify the status of national contingency planning for governments, establish the extent of training and exercises needed in the region and most importantly, facilitates the synchronization of resources and support between stakeholders.

Author(s):  
Ulbe Bosma

Many books have been written about the incorporation of the Caribbean region, South Asia, Africa and Latin America into the global economy. Remarkably, few have dealt with Island Southeast Asia or Maritime Southeast Asia as a macro-region. For the Caribbean nations, it has been amply discussed how the legacies of the plantation economies consisted of meagre economic growth and massive unemployment. Conversely, scant attention has been given to the question how societies in Island Southeast Asia were turned into providers of cheap commodities and how this impacted their long-term development prospects. This silence is even more remarkable considering some striking parallels with Caribbean socio-economic trajectories. Today, emigration of millions is the fate of Island Southeast Asia, as it is for the Caribbean region. To break the silence and to invite further discussion I wrote The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter. After reading the review by Dr Aguilar on this book in a previous issue of this journal, I felt that it could be worthwhile to highlight some of the main points of my argument about the peripheral integration of Island Southeast Asia in the global economy. I am grateful to the editors of the International Journal of Asian Studies for granting me the opportunity to do so.


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex J. Ruiz-Torres ◽  
Guillermo Cardoza ◽  
Markku Kuula ◽  
Yuritza Oliver ◽  
Henry Rosa-Polanco

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the relationships between the capabilities and performance characteristics of logistic service providers (LSPs) in the Caribbean region. The study considers the organization’s process improvement (PI) performance as it relates to their innovation capabilities, their efforts into information sharing and collaboration with customers, their planning for contingencies and considering the uncertainty of their customer’s technology. Design/methodology/approach A survey was applied to 88 LSP firms with operations in the Caribbean region. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the hypothesized relationships. Findings The results indicate that the PI performance of LSPs is significantly related to their innovation capabilities, and that these capabilities are positively related to collaboration and exchange of relevant information. Furthermore, they indicate that information sharing between LSPs and their customers significantly improves the quality of contingency planning. However, the study showed that innovation capabilities are not directly related to the LSPs’ focus on contingency planning and that customers’ technology uncertainty does not have a significant effect on the LSPs’ innovation capabilities. Research limitations/implications The sample of LSP firms is limited to three countries of the Caribbean region. Further examination of the model in additional countries and across multiple industrial contexts would increase the validity of the findings and expand to settings such as manufacturing and services. Originality/value This study measures operational performance of LSPs from a different perspective: its PI performance, and considers how multiple factors affect this performance.


Zootaxa ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 332 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID E. BAUMGARDNER ◽  
STEVEN K. BURIAN ◽  
DAVID BASS

The larval stages of Tricorythodes fictus Traver, T. cobbi Alba-Tercedor and Flannagan, and T. mosegus Alba-Tercedor and Flannagan are described for the first time based upon reared specimens. The rarely reported Asioplax dolani (Allen) is newly documented from the Austroriparian ecological region of Texas. Leptohyphes zalope Traver, known from the southwestern United States and much of Central America, is newly documented from the Caribbean Islands of Grenada and Tobago. This represents only the second leptohyphid mayfly known from both Continental America and the Caribbean region. Additional Caribbean records of Allenhyphes flinti (Allen) are also given.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Tracy Robinson

In Jamaica in the 1940s and 1950s, prominent women and women’s organizations led a notorious campaign to promote mass weddings. The campaign targeted working-class black Jamaicans living together in long-term heterosexual relationships and was aimed at improving the status of women and children and readying working-class Jamaicans for citizenship. This essay explores mass weddings as a form of women’s activism in the mid-twentieth century, and it reflects on M. G. Smith’s trenchant critique of mass weddings in his introduction to Edith Clarke’s iconic study My Mother Who Fathered Me. Smith identifies a governor’s wife as the instigator of the campaign, not the black Jamaican middle-class nationalist feminists who were responsible, yet his account has ascended to a form of academic folk knowledge that is oft repeated and rarely probed. As a valued resource for understanding late colonialism in the Caribbean, it has caricatured Caribbean feminist interventions in nationalist projects, and it contributes to the feminization of an enduring Caribbean “coloniality.”


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Cabrol ◽  
Cristina Pombo

Like other historic disruptions, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered chain-reactions in innovation, adaptation, and rapid behavioral change. The Latin American and Caribbean Region is no exception. The COVID-19 crisis has exposed a vast, pent-up demand for improvements in the quality, convenience, and cost of basic public services. While the ongoing human and economic toll of the pandemic has overshadowed the potential for dramatic and lasting gains in areas such as health, education, and remote work, it is not too early to ask how these gains might be retained and reinforced. This report highlights opportunities in telemedicine, tele-education, and telework the three areas we think are best positioned to achieve a profound digital transformation in the near-term. For each area, we offer a summary of the status quo, examples of early movers and innovators, and key questions regarding policy actions that can accelerate current trends.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayaka Campbell ◽  
Michael Taylor ◽  
Arnoldo Bezanilla-Morlot ◽  
Tannecia Stephenson ◽  
Abel Centella-Artola ◽  
...  

<p>Although the Caribbean region is considered amongst the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate and climate change, there are very few regional studies or studies matching the regions small scale and size that evaluate or quantify the impacts of these future changes.  The absence becomes even more stark when the long-term temperature goals (LTTGs) of 1.5°C, 2.0°C and 2.5°C above pre-industrial warming levels are considered. By selecting, validating and downscaling a subset of the Hadley Centre’s 17-member Perturbed Physics Ensemble for the Quantifying Uncertainty in Model Predictions (QUMP) project, future changes for both the LTTGs as well as mid and end of century are evaluated, for the entire Caribbean and its six (6) sub-regional zones. Showing distinct and significant sub-regional variations, on average the Caribbean was found to be 2.1°C (>4°C) warmer and 40% (70%) drier by mid-century (end of century). Analysis of the LTTGS shows that the region surpasses lowest target, 1.5 °C, before the end of the 2020’s and experiences progressive warming that spread equatorward as successive thresholds are attained 2.0°C (2030’s) and 2.5°C (2050´s). The far western, the southern and the eastern Caribbean are found to be up to 50% drier at 1.5°C, with intensifications noted for changes at 2.0°C with a reversal of a wet tendency in the north and central Caribbean. The sub-regional variations that exist shows that although the Caribbean lags the globe in its attainment of the LTTGs some of its six subregions are more comparable to the global than the Caribbean mean with the transition from 1.5°C to 2.0°C seeming to represent a turning point for the Caribbean.</p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 94 (7) ◽  
pp. 1065-1073 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Taylor ◽  
Abel Centella ◽  
John Charlery ◽  
Arnoldo Bezanilla ◽  
Jayaka Campbell ◽  
...  

By the beginning of the current century, there was heightened recognition that the Caribbean is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Yet, there was very little climate change science information for the region and at the scale of the small islands that make up most of the region. To fill the gap, a group of regional scientists representing three institutions and four territories (Barbados, Belize, Cuba, and Jamaica) initiated a project to provide dynamically downscaled climate change information for the Caribbean. The Providing Regional Climates for Impacts Studies (PRECIS)-Caribbean initiative was premised on a shared workload with goals to build regional capacity to provide climate change information for the region from within the region, to provide much needed climate information in the shortest possible time frame, and to create a platform for sharing the information as widely as possible. Ten years later offers the opportunity for retrospection and evaluation, particularly since a phase 2 initiative is being formulated. By both accident and design, the legacies of the PRECIS-Caribbean initiative include i) the positioning of the Caribbean to pose and answer for itself some of the emerging second-generation climate change questions; ii) the emergence of a regional template for capacity building in the sciences through cooperation; iii) an expanded regional capacity to undertake climate science; and iv) a significant body of climate change and climate science knowledge relevant to and at the scale of the Caribbean region.


2013 ◽  
pp. 70-71
Author(s):  
Pablo A. Pulido

The Pan American Federation of Associations of Faculties (Schools) of Medicine - FEPAFEM/PAFAMS - is a non-governmental, on-profit academic organization that joins the National Associations of Medical Schools for the Hemisphere. For some countries the growth in the number of schools and colleges has been explosive in recent decades to where now there are, in fact, about 706 medical schools in the Americas: 181 in North America, 190 in Central America and the Caribbean region and 335 in South America. This represents approximately 31% of the world total. Of these, 559 (79%) of the hemisphere´s medical schools are affiliated with FEPAFEM/PAFAMS.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document