- Few Caribbean utilities can maintain all the specialist equipment, crews, spare parts, and surge capacity needed after a major disaster, making mutual aid across the region essential.
- Shared digital platforms such as AURSI, with support from ONE Caribbean, can help utilities share real-time information, identify resources, and lay the groundwork for pooled procurement.
- Recent experience in Jamaica shows how regional coordination and shared resources can support faster restoration and recovery when disasters strike.
When disasters strike, restoring water and energy services is fundamental to community recovery. Yet these interconnected systems are often among the hardest to bring back online. Electricity powers water abstraction, treatment, pumping, desalination, wastewater operations, and emergency response. Safe water, in turn, underpins public health, livelihoods, economic activity, and the functioning of homes, hospitals, schools, and businesses.
In this context, Caribbean resilience depends on utilities working together through mutual aid, shared digital platforms, pooled procurement, and rapid financing before, during, and after disasters.
This challenge is increasingly urgent as the Caribbean faces more frequent and severe climate-related shocks. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, 1,534 disasters affected 190 million people between 2000 and 2022, while regional loss-and-damage assessments show that hurricanes and floods remain among the leading sources of climate-related economic losses.
Hurricane Melissa: A Wake-Up Call for Regional Cooperation
Hurricane Melissa, which struck in October 2025, underscored the scale of this risk. The World Bank, in coordination with the IDB, initially estimated physical damage from Hurricane Melissa at US$8.8 billion, equivalent to 41 percent of Jamaica’s 2024 GDP. A later assessment estimated the broader economic impact at US$12.2 billion, or 56.7 percent of GDP, once losses and additional costs were also taken into account.
Events of this magnitude disrupt water and energy systems simultaneously, with consequences extending far beyond damaged infrastructure to livelihoods, economic activity, and, too often, loss of life.
Yet few Caribbean utilities can independently maintain all the specialist equipment, skilled crews, spare parts, and surge capacity required after a major disaster. Given the relatively small scale of many national utility systems, no single utility can economically sustain every capability needed for infrequent but devastating events. This is where regional cooperation—and initiatives supported through the IDB’s flagship regional program, ONE Caribbean—can make a critical difference by helping countries pool expertise, resources, and operational capacity.
What Makes Mutual Aid Work in the Caribbean
Utility preparedness is the foundation of effective mutual aid. Through ONE Caribbean, the IDB has been supporting utilities to strengthen business continuity planning, update emergency response plans, improve restoration protocols, undertake training exercises, and enhance continuity-of-operations procedures. Together, these efforts are laying the groundwork for more coordinated regional responses when disasters strike.
The deepening of utility-to-utility cooperation across the region is integral to success. Regional frameworks led by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Caribbean Electric Utility Services Corporation (CARILEC), and the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency already provide important mechanisms for collaboration.
After Hurricane Melissa, this regional approach was demonstrated in practice when CARILEC activated its Disaster Assistance Programme to support Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS), coordinating line workers, equipment, and materials from 17 regional utilities and two private contractors to help rebuild transmission and distribution networks.
Less than a month after the hurricane, by November 10, 2025, 131 line workers had been deployed, and JPS reported that 64 percent of customers had regained electricity. Restoration had also reached 81 percent of major health facilities, 56 percent of critical telecommunication sites, and 58 percent of National Water Commission critical sites.
The lesson is clear: mutual aid works best when arrangements are defined before an emergency. That means utilities need greater certainty about who can help, which technical standards apply, what equipment and crews are available, and how cross-border support can be mobilized quickly and efficiently.
Real-Time Information for Water Utilities
Effective mutual aid depends on timely information. A major advance has been the virtual community model supported through the Advanced Utility Resources and Supply Initiative (AURSI) platform, designed to enable practical operational collaboration among utilities.
Supported through ONE Caribbean, AURSI helps utilities share information on available equipment, parts, materials, and technical specifications in real time. Implementation is now moving from an initial data-sharing pilot to a more operational and digitized model bringing together water service providers from The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. The goal is to improve visibility across water utility systems, enabling faster decision-making, reducing duplication of effort, and strengthening preparedness before disasters occur.
Pooling Purchasing Power
Regional collaboration also creates opportunities to strengthen procurement. Pooled procurement—where multiple utilities combine purchasing power to achieve economies of scale and reduce costs—offers significant potential, although it has yet to be fully developed in the Caribbean.
Through AURSI, ONE Caribbean is helping to establish the foundations for pooled procurement by working with water utilities involved in the initiative on areas of demand, available inventories, and technical specifications. Planned functionality will allow participating utilities to aggregate common demand and compare compatible specifications, as well as identify surplus or urgently needed materials and coordinate joint purchases through a more transparent regional marketplace. In turn, this may improve access to critical equipment and supplies, reduce procurement costs, and accelerate recovery following disasters.
How Can Finance Support Rapid Recovery?
Coordination and procurement alone are not sufficient. Utilities also need rapid access to financing to procure emergency equipment, restore operations, and invest in long-term resilience.
Countries already draw on a wider post-disaster financing toolkit including national contingency reserves or disaster funds, contingent financing products provided by MDBs, such as the IDB’s Contingent Credit Facility, crisis response windows and catastrophe bonds, and sovereign risk-transfer mechanisms.
Complementing these sovereign-level instruments, the Caribbean Water Utility Insurance Collective (CWUIC) provides a targeted utility-level mechanism that supports water-sector preparedness and resilience investments, while offering parametric insurance that can provide rapid liquidity after disasters.
Following Hurricane Beryl in July 2024, CWUIC reached an important milestone when the National Water and Sewerage Authority of Grenada received its first insurance payout within 14 days, demonstrating how disaster risk finance can help utilities meet urgent recovery needs.
How Preparedness Supported Jamaica’s Recovery
When Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica, earlier sector-level preparedness training enabled the National Water Commission (NWC) and its partners to rapidly assess damage and prioritize restoration. Through AURSI, NWC was able to identify neighboring Caribbean utilities with compatible emergency materials needed for recovery.
Those resources were quickly translated into an operational response: NWC mobilized islandwide field teams, deployed generators to strategic facilities, moved additional generators from less-affected distribution systems to harder-hit western parishes, and coordinated closely with the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) to restore three-phase power to water pumps serving critical infrastructure.
Together, these measures helped bring major distribution systems in central and western parishes back online and helped restore approximately 95.2 percent of NWC water supply within three months.
The experience demonstrated how preparedness, digital information sharing, regional cooperation, and access to resources can work together to accelerate recovery.
The Next Phase: Preparedness as Part of Daily Operations
The next phase is to embed these capabilities into daily utility operations. Routine use of shared digital platforms can improve visibility of equipment, spare parts, and technical expertise across the region, enabling utilities to identify the most appropriate mutual aid partners before disasters occur. Over time, these same platforms can support more efficient procurement, faster deployment of resources, and increasingly coordinated regional responses to future emergencies.
The message is clear: strengthening Caribbean water and energy resilience requires more than resilient national utilities. It requires regional cooperation. Investing in mutual aid, shared digital platforms, pooled procurement, resilient infrastructure, harmonized standards, and innovative financing can help Caribbean utilities reduce recovery times, protect vulnerable communities, and maintain essential services when they are needed most.
By deepening regional integration and strengthening utility-to-utility collaboration, Caribbean countries can transform individual resilience efforts into a more coordinated and effective regional response.
For more information about ONE Caribbean, please watch the video below.