SAINT LUCIA’S Former Minister of Sustainable Development, Dr. James Fletcher, has been appointed to lead the efforts of the Government of Dominica to establish the Climate Resilience Execution Agency of Dominica (CREAD).
Over the last three years, Dominica has been hit by two severe weather events, namely Tropical Storm Erika, which caused losses and damage amounting to 90% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), and Hurricane Maria, which last year devastated the country and resulted in damage equivalent to 226% of GDP.
In response to these events, the Prime Minister of Dominica, Roosevelt Skerrit, in his address to a CARICOM-UNDP Conference in New York in November 2017 stated “the unprecedented challenge we face has led us to take the unprecedented decision to build an execution agency outside of our standard public service systems. We are calling it CREAD – Climate Resilience Execution Agency of Dominica.
The mission of the agency will be to coordinate all reconstruction work to avoid duplication, maximize economies of scale, spot and fill critical gaps, avoid bureaucratic infighting and ensure all reconstruction activities are focussed on a single Climate Resilient Recovery Plan developed by Dominica and its partners”.
In his 2018 Budget Statement entitled “From Survival, To Sustainability And Success: A Resilient Dominica”, which he delivered on 25th July 2018, Prime Minister Skerrit further explained that “the CREAD will also perform an important function of retooling public officers by exposing them to new technologies and systems in engineering design, project management and procurement to increase their efficiency and effectiveness in managing donor and local resources for project design and implementation.”
When fully established, CREAD will operate as a statutory body that is accountable to the Parliament. Dr. Fletcher’s assignment as head of the CREAD Transition Team started on 1st June 2018.