Small craft accidents cause 400 deaths a year: Official

By Moya Iowa
An estimated 400 people in PNG die every year in small craft accidents while thousands of lives are affected by natural disasters due to climate change, a senior official from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says.
UNDP deputy resident representative Tracy Vienings said this while speaking during a workshop to validate the “Strengthening multi-sectoral adaptation responses through climate-related information (Smart Climate)” project in Port Moresby yesterday.
Vienings said Papua New Guineans still continued to suffer from avoidable deaths and serious damages caused by natural disasters often worsened by climate change and that one way to combat this was through support from the Green Climate Fund (GCF) which the Smart Climate proposal was pushing for.
Smart Climate is a proposal by the PNG Government, supported by UNDP to draw support from the global GCF to help PNG adapt to climate change, and has been developed over the past year.
Vienings said that the project was aimed at developing early warning systems for the many hazards faced in PNG.
She said that people were better prepared when they were warned in advance of impending disasters.
Vienings added that the government’s Climate Change Development Authority (CCDA), with assistance from UNDP, was seeking significant funding from GCF to develop a multi-hazard early warning system that would enable the collection of early climate change data and disseminate this information to the various sectors that would need it, such as maritime, provinces and farmers.