CDB’s climate resilient roads project moving ahead, Dominica added

The Board of Directors of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) has expanded the scope of an ongoing road transport project that encompasses Guyana to include Dominica, given the devastation caused there by Hurricane Maria in 2017.

A release from the CDB yesterday said that the Hurricane had a major impact on transportation infrastructure in the Eastern Caribbean country, including damage to bridges and culverts from water-borne debris, landslides and the erosion of unpaved roads.

The release said that the project seeks to strengthen the capacity of the Bank’s Borrowing Member Countries (BMCs) to provide road infrastructure that is resilient to natural hazards and climate change impacts. It entails a study on approaches for mainstreaming climate resilience into the road transport sector in BMCs, as well as the piloting of these approaches in Guyana and Saint Lucia, and now Dominica.

Through the project, CDB’s BMCs will benefit from a toolkit developed to aid governments to make better decisions on investments in their road networks to improve resilience to climate-related events. Road sector representatives will also be trained as trainers in the application of the toolkit.

The “Planning for the Integration of Climate Resilience in the Road Transport Sector in CDB BMCs” Project began in March 2017, and is expected to be completed in March 2019. A regional road transport sector workshop was held at CDB’s Headquarters in July 2017, where current issues in the sector were ventilated and the Project was introduced to stakeholders, along with the ongoing work to revise CDB’s Transport Sector Policy and Strategy. Additional field work was done in Guyana and Saint Lucia in March and April of 2018.

The release said that the Project is being implemented under the African Caribbean Pacific-European UnionCaribbean Development Bank Natural Disaster Risk Management in CARIFORUM Countries Programme.