Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean
http://ochaonline.un.org/rolacLatin America and the Caribbean is a region of socio-cultural and geographic contrasts – it is highly urbanized with a population approaching 600 million, yet contains large remote areas with limited communication; and, despite two decades of continued democratic governance, is increasingly confronted with potential crises due to profound inequality, serious poverty and stagnating economies. The region perennially experiences multiple disasters caused by natural hazards resulting from the hurricane season and is frequently subject to prolonged seasonal rains, which have insidious but devastating effects upon the landscape and its people. Recent trends show that the frequency of natural disasters in the region is rising with one third of the total population considered vulnerable.
The Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean (ROLAC) encompasses all Latin American and Caribbean countries. It provides support to the OCHA National Disaster Response Advisers (NDRAs) in seven disaster-prone countries in the region; and provides surge capacity to OCHA field offices in Colombia and Haiti.
Despite the presence of disaster management organisations and the high public awareness of hazards the capacity of the national authorities and their commitment to disaster risk reduction varies significantly from country to country. ROLAC and the NDRAs will reinforce support for preparedness and response to United Nations Country Teams and to Resident Coordinators. ROLAC will also work with the NDRAs to increase collaboration and partnership in the region, in addition to enhancing capacity-building initiatives with national authorities.
The number of actors at the national, regional and subregional levels with their varied capacities and operational structures adds to the complexity of emergency coordination; however, the collective effort of the Risk, Emergency and Disasters Task Force of the Regional Inter-Agency Standing Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean, which ROLAC will continue to chair in 2009, promotes regional synergies directed at ensuring appropriate responses to affected populations. ROLAC will vigorously promote Humanitarian Country Teams (HCTs) as being instrumental to the success of future responses and will ensure that partners are trained in emergency response tools, including those related to humanitarian finance and clusters.
The Redhum project, a Latin America and Caribbean humanitarian information platform launched by ROLAC in 2007, will continue to support the accessibility of regional and national partners to relevant humanitarian information, thereby bolstering regional collaboration. The increasing number of partners who are providing information and using Redhum have made it a highly regarded and utilized central tool for humanitarian information analysis.
Key Objectives, Outputs and Indicators
