Jamaica tourism minister Edmund Bartlett has confirmed the Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre will open in Kingston on October 8.
The launch of a tourism resilience barometer will be among its first initiatives.
Bartlett said: “We’re building a barometer to measure the level of sustainability a destination has – what type of information arrangements, what type of connectivity, what kind of partnerships exist between public and private sector, what medical arrangements are in place.”
He told the Asian Resilience Summit: “An annual tourism barometer will be published and with it a journal of academic articles on crisis management.”
The Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre is already functioning, having been established last year.
But the centre will formally open its doors at Kingston University in October.
The minister told the summit in Nepal: “Disruptions in the form of climate events and seismic events – and now cyber threats – have grown and we have not managed them well.
“Some countries never recover. In 2017, Barbuda in the Caribbean was hit by Hurricane Irma and today Barbuda is a piece of rock.
“How do we help to manage these disruptions, to recover and thrive?
“That is the basis on which the Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre has been established – to create a repository of knowledge, best practice, research and data.”