This session unpacks Jamaica’s strategic approach to crisis response during Hurricane Melissa, highlighting how rapid coordination, pre-arranged financing instruments, and decisive governance enabled swift mobilisation of resources when every hour mattered. Participants will gain insight into the country’s playbook for unlocking fast liquidity, aligning public and private sector actors, and maintaining operational continuity under pressure. More than a case study, the discussion positions resilient statecraft as a disciplined system—where preparedness, financial innovation, and institutional agility converge to protect lives, stabilise economies, and accelerate recovery in the face of escalating climate threats.

Opportunity for participants to connect and discuss insights from the keynote session.

Focuses on linking Caribbean states have made important progress in securing rapid post-disaster liquidity through parametric insurance, regional risk pooling, catastrophe bonds, and contingency credit lines. However, the central challenge is not only how quickly funds are disbursed to governments, but how quickly they reach affected populations. This panel shifts the conversation from sovereign payout speed to delivery pathways — examining how disaster risk financing instruments can be structurally linked to shock-responsive social protection systems, MSME support programmes, and local government activation mechanisms. Panelists will explore trigger design that aligns with social protection expansion, payout sequencing that prioritises vulnerable households, digital transfer systems that reduce delay and leakage, and pre-agreed expenditure frameworks that allow emergency cash transfers, food assistance, public works programmes, and temporary employment schemes to scale immediately after impact. The discussion will also address equity considerations, gender-sensitive targeting, and informal sector inclusion. The goal is to move beyond liquidity theory and establish a practical blueprint for integrating sovereign risk financing with people-centred recovery systems — ensuring that financial preparedness translates into social stability and faster, more inclusive recovery outcomes.

Tourism remains one of the Caribbean’s most critical economic pillars — yet it sits directly on the frontline of climate volatility. Rising sea levels, coastal erosion, extreme heat, stronger hurricanes, water stress, and ecosystem degradation are reshaping the risk landscape for hotels, ports, attractions, and tourism-dependent communities.

Disasters rapidly deplete health budgets through emergency procurement, surge staffing, and infrastructure repair. This session explores contingency budgeting, reserve funds, rapid procurement systems, and regional medical cost-sharing agreements. The conversation shifts from reactive emergency spending to structured financial buffers that ensure continuity of care

This closed-door regional dialogue will convene Caribbean government representatives, alongside technical partners, to advance a shared understanding of disaster displacement as a growing and complex risk across the region. The session will examine the humanitarian, development, and climate dimensions of displacement, while drawing on regional risk profiles and global good practices to inform more coordinated and policy-relevant responses. Through a facilitated exchange, participants will explore existing approaches, identify key data and policy gaps, and consider opportunities to strengthen integration of displacement into national and regional frameworks. Designed to support open and candid discussion, the dialogue aims to contribute to more coherent regional action, improved use of data for decision-making, and strengthened collaboration between governments and technical partners.

Participants can connect over lunch and discuss insights from concurrent sessions.

Many resilience projects fail to attract financing because they are poorly packaged or lack return metrics. These roundtables connect governments, development banks, insurers, and private capital around pre-identified resilience investment pipelines — infrastructure retrofits, microgrids, water redundancy systems, digital early warning expansion, and agriculture resilience projects. The emphasis is on structuring projects for blended finance, concessional funding, and de-risked private participation.

A short break for participants to refresh and network before the next session.

This Resilience Village session moves beyond individual sector solutions to demonstrate how recovery speed depends on system integration across infrastructure, energy, finance, and governance. Rather than presenting isolated tools, the showcase illustrates how decentralised power systems, climate-resilient infrastructure design, pre-arranged liquidity instruments, and coordinated command structures must operate as a unified architecture to prevent prolonged disruption. Using structured scenario walkthroughs, presenters will demonstrate how crossministry coordination, sequenced financing triggers, infrastructure prioritisation protocols, and energy continuity planning work together to compress recovery timelines. The emphasis is on integration — showing how engineered systems, fiscal systems, and governance systems must align in real time to restore essential services and stabilise economies after major shocks

Financing resilience is meaningless without performance tracking. This session focuses on strengthening monitoring, evaluation, and reporting systems tied to the CDM Strategy and Sendai Framework. It addresses inconsistent data collection, limited transparency, and weak follow-through. The goal is to move from output reporting (workshops held, plans drafted) to outcome tracking (recovery time reduced, insurance penetration increased, infrastructure downtime shortened).

Despite significant global funding available for climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction, many Caribbean governments, local authorities, and community organisations struggle to access grant financing due to complex application processes, limited technical capacity, and fragmented project pipelines. This half-day session brings together development banks, bilateral partners, climate funds, philanthropic foundations, and successful regional grantees to demystify the pathways to securing grant resources for resilience investments. Moving beyond high-level funding announcements, the session focuses on practical experience: how successful proposals are structured, how countries align national priorities with donor frameworks, and how institutions build the partnerships and technical readiness required to move from concept to approved grant. Participants will hear directly from agencies that have secured major DRR and climate adaptation grants, alongside funding partners who will outline upcoming financing windows, eligibility criteria, and collaboration models. The objective is to equip Caribbean stakeholders with a clearer roadmap for mobilising grant resources hat strengthen infrastructure, protect communities, and accelerate implementation of the CDM Strategy (2014 –2030).