Quality ‘watchword for disaster resilience’

A leading engineer has called for a national effort to build quality into infrastructure and low-income housing in order to strengthen the nation’s resilience to the extreme weather events associated with climate change.

The head of the Barbados Association of Professional Engineers (BAPE) Trevor Browne told a workshop on disaster resilience at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre that Barbados must improve infrastructure since storms can affect many sectors in a country.

He suggested there were low-cost options to make low-income houses more hardy, as he responded to Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s comments on the standard of low income housing earlier in the meeting…

Costs of natural disasters are increasing at the high end

While the economic cost of natural disasters has not increased much on average, averages can be deceptive. The costs of major disasters like hurricanes Katrina, Maria and Dorian or the massive tornado swarms in the Midwest have increased to a disproportionately larger extent than those of lesser events, and these major disasters have become far more expensive, according to an international team of researchers…