Secretary-General Patricia Scotland urges international response to Caribbean hurricanes
Secretary-General Patricia Scotland has made an impassioned plea for urgent, collective international response to natural disasters, as another Caribbean country was left in ruins by the third catastrophic hurricane in days.
Maria, the latest category 5 hurricane, barrelled through Dominica at a speed of nearly 160 miles per hour. It ripped off roofs in the Secretary-General’s birthplace, trapping people, including Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, in topless houses "at the complete mercy of the hurricane".
In broadcast interviews with the UK’s Sky News and Channel 4 News, the Secretary-General said she was reaching out to Commonwealth partners, collaborating and coordinating to support the Caribbean islands affected.
“It is heart-breaking. For those who didn’t understand what existential threat meant, regrettably we are seeing it all too clearly in Irma and now tragically in Maria,” she told Channel 4.
“In the region you have CDEMA which is the disaster emergency management. But what we have traditionally done is to respond to one incident, what we have now is a multiplicity of incidents happening all over, not just in this region but elsewhere.
“You have to remember we’ve had mudslides in Sierra Leone, we’ve had floods in Bangladesh, in India and in Pakistan and this now is an onslaught on the Caribbean. So it is overseas territories, independent countries, all of us being hit together. That’s why I think we need one plan in terms of how do we respond together, how do we articulate a way forward.”
She continued, “I am pulling together in the Commonwealth, people from right across the place to see how can we put forward a task force which will look at exactly how we coordinate, and how we take this seriously. We know that all of us need to make this difference, because if not now when are we going to understand that this is a huge problem for all of us? And if not us then who?”
Later in her interview with Sky News, the Secretary-General stressed the need for longer term strategies to address climate change and build resilience.
“We’ve got to fix this and we’ve got to do it together, all of us, every shoulder has to be to the wheel, because the people who are suffering, the people who may be dying tonight need us to do that.”
She added, “We know that this isn’t the last category 5 hurricane. If you look at how many have been coming, and they have been coming faster and more furiously, that’s our reality.
“We in the Commonwealth are looking at creating a regenerative model, which takes into account sustainability and helps to build resilience, renewal and a better response. I am so proud of all the things the Commonwealth has already done on debt management, on resilience, on climate change, but this is only the beginning. We’ve all got to really now put a turbo charge behind this, because that’s what nature is doing, she’s turbo charging and we have to be able to respond.”
Watch the full Channel 4 interview here.
