Guyana’s Agri. Minister elected as Chair of 61st Session of the Caribbean Meteorological Council

Today, Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha was elected to serve as the Chairman of the 61st Session of the Caribbean Meteorological Council for the next 12 months. 

The Caribbean Meteorological Council, is the governing body of the Caribbean Meteorological Organisation (CMO), a specialised agency of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).

Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha

While delivering the feature address, Minister Mustapha said given the importance of having access to accurate and up-to-date weather information, the government, since taking office, has made several investments to improve the public weather service in Guyana.

“It is in this context that the development of a National Flood Early Warning System became extremely relevant and in June of this year, Guyana launched its first National Flood Early Warning System. While the system is still in its pilot phase, its development is critical to protecting lives, livelihoods, and property. Critical to our medium-term development agenda, the Government of Guyana recently developed a roadmap for the development of a National Multi-Hazard Early Warning System. Additionally, to further enhance the public weather service, investments have also been made to repair the radar, and to facilitate the maintenance of Automatic Weather Stations,” Minister Mustapha said.

The Caribbean Meteorological Council is the supreme organ of the Organisation and comprises ministers responsible for meteorology. While acting as Chair, Minister Mustapha will be tasked with guiding issue directions of a general or special character as to the policy to be pursued by the Organization and its any organs.

Outlining Guyana’s current efforts towards building resilience and attaining sustainable development, Minister Mustapha noted that a major component to achieving those goals would involve the integration of water, weather, and climate services and solutions.

This recognition, he said, is underscored in the recently revised National Development Strategy: The Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS), which has been expanded to include biodiversity and ecosystem services, the maritime environment, and water resources management.

The minister said further, that Guyana, through the Hydrometeorological Service along with other government and non-governmental agencies, is committed to accomplishing the integration of weather, climate, and water agendas through national adaptation and resilience policies. 

“In the specific case of the Hydrometeorological Service, and in its role of national regulator, a Strategic Plan was recently developed with support under the Climate Resilience and Early Warning Systems (CREWS) Project and the Caribbean Meteorological Organization. This Strategic Plan has allowed Guyana to align the national priorities on weather, water and climate with the ambitions of the international community as led regionally by the Caribbean Meteorological Organization (CMO) and internationally by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO),” the minister added.

Furthermore, Minister Mustapha told the Council that Guyana, with support from its regional and international partners, has been working to strategically improve and expand its observational and monitoring infrastructure with investments in state-of-the-art technologies.

“In the last two years alone, we have been able to upgrade the country’s climate data management system to international standards, inclusive of the training of local staff, which is currently ongoing. We also invested in the procurement of computing power to facilitate Climate modeling which will, over the next few years, allow our staff to work with international partners to enhance Guyana’s climate modeling capacity. There were also investments made to procure a Direct Readout Ground Station (DRGS) which is scheduled to be installed shortly. This will improve the management of national hydrometeorological data, allowing the Hydrometeorological Service to have complete control over its data flows, and would also improve the efficiency in which we manage and maintain our observational network,”

Minister Mustapha succeeds Saint Vincent and the Grenadines’ Prime Minister, Ralph Gonsalves, who served as Chair of the 60th CMC.

The CMC was established by its Member States in 1962, to further the regionalization of meteorology in the Anglophone Caribbean. 

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