PM marshals monetary resources to mitigate potential impact of Melissa
Published:Saturday | October 25, 2025 | 12:07 AMKaren Madden/Gleaner Writer
With Tropical Storm Melissa projected to cause major damage to Jamaica’s infrastructure amid widescale flooding and landslides, the country is expected to be forced to draw on several monetary sources for immediate attention and rehabilitation.
Addressing a special press briefing looking at preparations for the potential hurricane at Jamaica House in St Andrew yesterday, Prime Minister (PM) Dr Andrew Holness outlined some of the sources that the country could draw on, depending on the level of damage sustained.
“We have a fairly robust system of fiscal resilience. It starts with a contingency, which is built within the Budget, that’s approximately $5 billion. There’s also the National Disaster Fund and I believe that has about a $1 billion in it.
However, outside of those internal sums, the country can turn to external sources.
“We have the CCRIF (Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Fund). That’s a the parametric fund, it is almost like an insurance. The payout of the CCRIF is triggered by certain threshold of damage. So it’s very difficult to say what we can get from it, but I believe that we can access about US$37.3 million for excess rainfall.”
The CCRIF is a regional risk insurance facility designed to provide member governments with immediate liquidity in the event of a devastating hurricane or earthquake.
The PM also listed other sources of funds.
CATASTROPHE BOND
“And we do have the Catastrophe Bond, again it’s dependent on the level of damage. We can get about US$300 million. Then there is a facility we negotiated with the IDB (Inter American Development Bank) for about US$285 million, it could be a little bit more. We do have a graded set of funds, some we can use immediately and some would be triggered by the severity of the event.
Meanwhile, Robert Morgan, the minister with responsibility for works, announced that the allocation to the most vulnerable section of the island has been doubled since it was first announced.
“Initially, based on projections we had from the Met Office, we focused our mitigation efforts from the eastern side of the island coming down to the south and you would have seen on the map that ODPEM (Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management) put up, it shows you where the flood-prone areas and landslides are prone to happen,” Morgan said during the press briefing.
“East Rural St Andrew, West Rural St Andrew, South Eastern Clarendon, South West Clarendon, Bull Bay, St Thomas, sections of Portland. We focused initially on that with our $200-million allocation. As the projections changed, we recognised that we will probably have rain events right across the island, so we then gave a blanket allocation to every single constituency across the island, so that the base is $3 million to every constituency, but for constituencies that are flood prone, that are likely to have extraordinary flooding events, we gave additional allocations.”
The minister said the Government is prepared to increase the monetary allocation as the need arises.
“As the situation evolves and we get more information, the prime minister will have to do his assessment and determine whether or not we will have to find more allocations. But, as it is now, $400 million is what we have allocated, $3 million to every constituency as a base, some areas have gotten more. The money is not given to MPs (members of parliament), it is an allocation for disaster mitigation, which is managed by the National Works Agency.”
The increased allocation complements the ongoing national drain-cleaning and infrastructure preparedness programme being coordinated by the Ministry of Economic Growth and Infrastructure Development and ODPEM.