The centre, which is the first such facility in the world, was approved at a meeting of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) held in Montego Bay last November, with backing from stakeholders including the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association, and the Caribbean Tourism Organisation.
Bartlett argued that the centre will give the region the capacity to be better able to manage, mitigate, and quickly recover from these events. The centre will be armed with guidelines, tool kits and policies to handle the recovery process in the event of a crisis, facilitating information flow among all stakeholders in the tourism industry within and outside of the region.
The centre is to be set up before the end of the year.
This is an edited extract from an article that first appeared in the Jamaica Observer.
