A senior coordinator at the United Nations Capacity for Disaster Reduction Initiatives (CADRI) based in Geneva, Switzerland, has called for more efforts to address climate change issues. Hachim Badji was speaking to reporters yesterday shortly after having a closed-door discussion with the vice president and minister of Women’s Affairs, Aja Dr Isatou Njie-Saidy at State House.

The CADRI senior coordinator, who was on his second visit to The Gambia was accompanied to the Office of the Vice President by officials of UN agencies such as UNDP and WFP. He explained that this visit was meant to brief the vice president on the findings of their capacity assessment in The Gambia regarding DRR. Badji further said that the visit also availed him the opportunity to brief the VP about the recommendations and the way forward on how to establish a National Strategy and National Operational Plan for the coming years on DRR in The Gambia.

His words: “The assessment was done at the end of November and the beginning of December in 2011. Going by the findings in general, we were quite amazed about how much is already achieved in terms of building capacities for disaster management in The Gambia, to be able to respond to disasters in the country. A lot has been done.”

He further stated that the understanding of the concept of reducing risk as part of developing, planning and also looking at climate change adaptations are concepts that are pretty well understood by many technicians in various ministries in The Gambia under the leadership of the Office of the Vice President. “It is clear that there is good understanding of these issues here.

Now that we understand all these, the issue now is how can we in practical terms, implement this so that we can be less affected by potential hazards coming and other threats like drought and floods. For decades, we have been working very hard on addressing those threats in terms of disaster response. Now the idea is how do we work on prevention side as well as the next stage in terms of risk reduction,” he stated and went on to commend the work done by NGOs under the umbrella of TANGO and Red Cross in creating more awareness about DRR.