CARIBBEAN-Caribbean to benefit from new IDB initiative.

BELÉM, Brazil, CMC – The Inter-American Development Bank Group (IDB Group) has launched two tools to help Latin American and Caribbean countries assess the risks and costs of disasters with greater precision.

The tools were launched at the ongoing 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30), which ends here on Friday.

The IDB Group said that RiskMONITOR visualizes data on disaster risk, its management, and its evolution over time across countries. It is based on 20 years of accumulated knowledge and uses specific indicators to assess each country’s preparedness, disaster response capacity, resource availability, and degree of vulnerability.

It said RiSKHUB is a platform that uses emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence, to project potential disaster impacts and apply this information to emergency response, territorial planning, infrastructure design, and the development of fiscal policy. It is intended for risk assessment experts in both the public and private sectors.

RiskMONITOR and RiskHUB are part of Ready and Resilient Americas, a regional programme launched by the IDB Group this year to increase disaster resilience.

The programme’s three pillars are: improving information on disaster risks, strengthening coordination mechanisms for an effective regional response, and implementing innovative financial instruments to enhance resilience and protect against disasters.

In addition, the IDB Group is collaborating with Google and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to expand the region’s adoption of two cutting-edge tools: the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and Flood Hub, a Google platform for flood monitoring.

It said authorities can use CAP to share critical safety alerts simultaneously across multiple communication channels, including sirens, radio, television, smartphones, and the internet. Flood Hub uses artificial intelligence and satellite data to provide flood forecasts up to seven days in advance.