By the Caribbean Journal staff

Jamaica is set to host a major new tourism conference this week.

It’s called the Tourism Resilience Summit, and it’s bringing together stakeholders from the Caribbean and the Americas to look at ways to build resilience across the region.

That includes addressing disruptive challenges from climate change to cybercrime.

The event is being spearheaded by Jamaica Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett, who has been making Jamaica a new global center for tourism-focused events, most notably with last year’s World Tourism Organization meeting in Montego Bay.

It’s being held at the University of the West Indies Mona campus in St Andrew, Jamaica.

“Because of its very character, [tourism] is susceptible to all sorts of shocks, both endogenous and exogenous, and these can have deleterious impact on economies and also on the pace of development as well as the scale and scope of developments in [tourism-dependent] countries,” Bartlett said.

This week’s summit will “assess existing and emerging disruptions related to tourism management globally, and the risk of these to the global tourism product; and identify a synergetic, strategic and operational framework for partnerships between and among major governmental, non-governmental and business entities to address and develop mitigation strategies for these disruptions,” Bartlett said.