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