IDB launches regional programme for disaster resilience

Mar 31, 2025 News

Kaieteur News- The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on Saturday launched Ready and Resilient Americas, a regional programme to make Latin America and the Caribbean more resilient to the disasters that harm its economies and quality of life.

The programme will expand and enhance the Bank’s work in this increasingly critical area, the IDB said in a press release. Ready and Resilient Americas aims to build stronger regional collaboration to boost resilience, improve readiness, ensure swift and effective responses, and bolster financial protection against disasters. Building on this proactive approach, the IDB will also allocate US$10 million in non-reimbursable financing to the program between 2025 and 2030.

This is additional to the IDB’s own financing and technical cooperation. At Saturday’s launch event during a plenary session with IDB and IDB Invest Governors at the 2025 Annual Meetings, IDB President Ilan Goldfajn and Chilean Finance Minister Mario Marcel emphasized how the program would be vital for better addressing the natural disasters affecting the region. Chile is co-sponsoring the program and has been key to initiate and promote this initiative. To date, 37 member countries have signed a declaration of commitment to this programme.

“Building resilience against natural disasters is no longer optional; it’s a necessity. The Ready and Resilient Americas initiative aims to strengthen disaster preparedness in our region by equipping countries with better data and tools, building a regional coordinated response and closing the financing gap by supporting resilience bonds and other risk-transfer tools,” said President Goldfajn.

Finance Minister Mario Marcel said, “Following the devastating forest fires and floods that recently affected Chile and many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, we came to the IDB with the conviction that disaster preparedness and resilience must be a priority. Today we celebrate the launch of Ready and Resilient Americas, and we are proud to participate and actively contribute to this vital initiative for the region – a program that comprehensively addresses management of natural disasters. We must remember that these emergencies have a preventive component, but also an action component. In Chile, we are well aware of this; in recent years, we have had to face fires, floods, and earthquakes. This is a phenomenon that is repeated in neighboring countries, so we must be able to act in a coordinated manner, with a focus on collaboration and containment.”

Latin America and the Caribbean is the second-most disaster-prone region in the world. In 2024, it experienced 74 major disasters that affected nearly seven million people and caused an estimated $10 billion in economic damage. Ready and Resilient Americas is supported by 16 strategic partners from the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and international organizations. These partnerships can drive technological innovations, foster cooperation with the public sector to pre-position goods and services, and help co-design financial solutions that optimize costs and improve emergency readiness and response.

The programme has three pillars. The first is to equip countries with advanced tools to better assess risks and their associated costs. This pillar also promotes technological innovation to make early-warning systems more accurate and improve adaptive social protection, focusing on the groups most exposed to and affected by natural phenomena.

The second pillar is to form a collaborative network among countries, subregional networks, international organizations, and the private sector to coordinate necessary services and goods and ensure they are deployed rapidly and effectively during a disaster. The third pillar promotes innovative financial instruments to strengthen countries’ resilience and economic capacity to cope with disasters. This includes support for issuing resilience bonds, catastrophe bonds, and swaps, and for regional mechanisms to lower insurance costs and increase coverage for agriculture and infrastructure.

(IDB launches regional programme for disaster resilience)

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