Minister Mustapha Chair of 61st Session of the Caribbean Meteorological Council

Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha, today 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). Mustapha
in delivering the feature address, 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,” Mustapha said.
The agriculture minister said that the Caribbean Meteorological Council is the supreme organ of
the Organisation and comprises ministers responsible for meteorology. He said that while acting
as Chair, he 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. The minister noted that outlining
Guyana’s current efforts towards building resilience and attaining sustainable development, he
stressed that a major component to achieving those goals would involve the integration of water,
weather, and climate services and solutions.

Mustapha said that this recognition, 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. Mustapha disclosed 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),” he explained.
The agriculture minister 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 declared.
He succeeds Saint Vincent and the Grenadines’ Prime Minister, Ralph Gonsalves, who served as
Chair of the 60 th  CMC. Mustapha noted that the CMC was established by its Member States in
1962, to further the regionalization of meteorology in the Anglophone Caribbean.