PIRAC worked in close collaboration with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Guadeloupe to organize the business readiness workshops. The objective is to provide representatives of small and medium-sized enterprises with an overview of concrete preparedness practices used to reduce the negative impact of climate change on businesses. Participants received presentations from experts in business preparedness, organizational resilience, and meteorology.
A total of 9 business representatives from Guadeloupe participated.
PIRAC Business Preparedness Officer Iuliia Kovalenko encouraged business leaders to be prepared, “The Caribbean region will face increasingly intense natural events due to climate change, so it is vital to understand the risks and develop a business continuity plan today to reduce the potential impact on one’s business.”
The READY Together program aims to strengthen the resilience of economic actors in the Caribbean region, especially small and medium-sized enterprises. In this, this type of workshop is innovative: indeed, it is the first time that such an exercise is carried out in Guadeloupe. There are still few initiatives in the Caribbean basin to raise awareness among businesses to equip themselves with tools and methods to prepare for disasters.
Yet the Caribbean island states, their citizens, economies and businesses are particularly exposed to climate change, with risks such as sea level rise, prolonged droughts, severe heat waves, increasingly powerful hurricanes, unusual flooding and new diseases. These events threaten the sustainability of small and medium-sized enterprises, which are a lever for the resilience of populations (job creation, access to basic goods, etc.).
The Ready Together program is co-financed by INTERREG Caribbean, the French Development Agency (AFD) and the Guadeloupe Region.
