Building capacity and resilience in the Pacific

AIDR's partner AFAC is helping to develop and deliver training workshops in multiple locations across the Pacific to build resilience and capacity to respond to natural disasters.

Countries in the Pacific rank amongst the most vulnerable to natural disasters. The increasing severity and frequency of these climate related disasters due to global warming require emergency management agencies in the Pacific to increase their capacity to prepare for and respond to disasters.

As part of the Pacific Islands Emergency Management Alliance (PIEMA), AFAC and the Pacific Community (SPC) have teamed up to develop and deliver regional workshops for trainers across Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia during March and April 2019. Adapted from AIIMS and contextualised for the Pacific, these workshops deliver a pilot course on Pacific Incident Management Systems (PACIMS) and Working in an Emergency Operations Centre.

A total of 15 trainers from Australia and New Zealand AFAC Member agencies are providing support across the three regional workshops. The program intends to establish new and strengthen existing relationships between the three key national agencies in the Pacific (National Disaster Management Office, Police and Fire) to operate consistently and cohesively with each other.

The regionally accredited training opportunity will create a common and consistent language and basic emergency management standards, providing an opportunity for strongly aligned doctrine between agencies and across the region. The outcomes and learnings of the workshops will be reviewed during May and will integrate into the future program planning and design of the PIEMA Program.