Inception Report - CDEMA

a) Making CCDRR gender sensitive
While acute gender-specific disadvantages for women are not prevalent in the region, these
issues still require some consideration. Oxfam 9 believes that women’s disadvantage – their
unequal access to resources, legal protection, decision making and power, their reproductive
burden, and their vulnerability to violence – consistently render them more vulnerable than men
to the impacts of climate change and disasters. Women also bring certain advantages. For
example, the skills and experience of women in building and maintaining local social networks
can be critical for local disaster risk reduction. Understanding how gender relations shape
women’s and men’s lives is therefore critical to effective climate change adaptation and disaster
risk reduction.
b) Approaches that take underlying cause of vulnerability into account
Many approaches to community-based disaster risk reduction fail to include a comprehensive
assessment and subsequent consideration of the underlying causes of vulnerability. Without this
information, it is likely that interventions would have little success in the long term. The IFRC,
under its Preparedness for Climate Change (PfCC) initiative, is working with communities to
conduct vulnerability and capacity assessments in vulnerable communities. This process
identifies who is vulnerable and why. A crucial component of the project has been the
recognition that livelihoods are a key aspect of building people’s resilience to various types of
risk. Through its experience of working with communities, the IFRC has developed a wealth of
tools and good practice methodologies aimed at helping to raise awareness, mitigate risks and
develop community skills to respond to disasters.
The CARIBSAVE Partnership has developed a methodology to assess the adaptive capacity
and vulnerability of communities to climate change, and uses a livelihood approach to do this.
Households within vulnerable communities are interviewed to determine their access to the five
livelihood assets (financial, physical, natural, social and human). Livelihood strategies
(combinations of assets) are evaluated to conclude the adaptive capacity of households and
consequently communities.
c) Approaches that place a strong emphasis on preventative action (building resilience)
Within the Caribbean region, the paradigm shift towards community resilience as part of a
comprehensive disaster management approach predates the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005
– 2015. In its 2001 Strategy and Results Framework for Comprehensive Disaster Management
in the Caribbean, the Caribbean Disaster and Emergency Response Agency (CDERA), now the
Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), acknowledged the community
approach as an “effective way of selling integration of disaster mitigation to the population”
because it can be applied on a scale and in terms that resonate at the local level. This shift to
disaster risk reduction has also been a key feature in the work of the International Federation of
Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRCS) with communities in the Caribbean to reduce
their vulnerability through awareness, consideration of existing community coping mechanisms,
capacity building and participatory approaches to increasing their resilience.
d) Strategies developed with communities
Community involvement in the design of response strategies is critical and should be initiated
from the outset. The IFRC, through its Regional Disaster Management Framework, and
9 Oxfam GB, 2010. Gender, Disaster Risk Reduction, and Climate Change Adaptation: A Learning Companion
Oxfam Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation Resources.
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