The Global Gateway Coordination forum for the Caribbean Basin has ended here with the delegates from the Caribbean, Central America and Europe agreeing in principle to join forces in strengthening the provision of meteorological and climate services.
The collaboration meeting was one of the segments of the overarching 2026 Wet/Hurricane Season Caribbean Climate Outlook forum (CariCOF) stakeholder forum which ended here on Thursday.
During the forum on the provision of these services, the regional and international experts representing the areas of climate change, meteorology, natural hazards and emergency management, took the common position and committed to working together to ensure the dissemination of accurate forecasting and monitoring of weather and climate phenomena, communicating risks and essential information to the early warning systems (EWS).
Principal of the Barbados-based Caribbean Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH), Dr David Farrell, announced a proposal by his agency to send groups of young potential scientists to Europe this year as part of an initiative to upgrade their skills and competencies for improved outcomes.
Farrell said he agreed to a suggestion made to him by the executive secretary for the United States-based Regional Water Resources Committee, Maximilliano Campos Ortiz,, to extend the collaboration and consultations beyond the English and Spanish-speaking Caribbean to include the Dutch and French.
“When we started this conversation last April discussions on collaboration started last April, this is kind of where we wanted to get…this level of agreement for collaboration, peer-to-peer in medits (Medical Information Technology Services]. I know Shawn Boyce (of CIMH) will be going over to JRC in a week’s time. And as part of his initial in medits step…we had some people over in January or December last year.
“But,“I also want to put an offer on the table. We’ve got the embedded offer on the table if you are going to exploit itt. I also want to put an offer on the table that I send a number of young people to Europe. They are going to owe me big at the end of this. Let me be very clear what I expect on the issue…that they come back with the knowledge of doing things with regard to their thesis work,” Farrell said.
The CIMH’s principal explained that this is how knowledge will be built in the region, to have these young people go and see and build a relationship.”
He said he was looking forward to sending three people from the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica as well as three others from the CIMH center in Barbados.
“You can go to Europe for a week, two weeks, whatever it is, and learn, and build a relationship that can inform your thesis…because, at the end of the day, what I would like to see that this has not been a research agenda, but the people’s thesis.”
Farrell reasoned that if he could get others to build on this at scale that matters to this region, it would have achieved what he envisioned.
He said he believes this opportunity would be “extremely” useful to these young people to get exposure at this critical part of their education, and then to use exposure to build something beneficial.
The scientist thinks if three or four out of six of them were to grab the opportunity and succeed, it would be a major outcome and that the CIMH is sending a third person to study in Germany later this year.
“I think this is the pathway to helping us to build that support system internally, and building products and services on top of what exists that scale to this level, as part of a peer project.”
Farrell said he hoped the decision to work together at the regional and Central American levels would not be a one-off effort, especially since “we share similar challenges, maybe at different scales, but similar challenges in terms of capacity, and in the types of tropical storms and other climate hazards required to make decisions and challenges with tropical storms.
“We can make this into a much bigger collaboration relating to benefits when we can share resources. We should really have Central America in this discussion because we share a lot of the similar challenges,” he added.
The European Union officials who sat on the Global Gateway panel discussion accepted Farrell’s proposal and said they looked forward to welcoming those who would be going there with Ortiz also agreeing to collaborate with the Caribbean.
In fact, the common refrain at almost every panel discussion and from the lips of the various other speakers, was the need for collaboration between the Caribbean, its wider Latin American neighbours and the global arena.
The two-day meeting here was hosted by The Bahamian government in association with the CIMH, the EU, the World Meteorological Organisation, the Caribbean Meteorological Organisation, Climate Services and Related Applications Programme (ClimSA), and the Construction Recruitment External Workers Services (CREWS). (CMC)
