Under its flagship Infrastructure for Resilient Island States (IRIS) programme, CDRI supports 23 projects across 25 SIDS to achieve sustainable development through resilient, inclusive, and sustainable infrastructure. IRIS projects are funded through the Infrastructure Resilience Accelerator Fund (IRAF), a multi-partner trust fund established with support from the Governments of India, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and the European Union. Focus areas include policies and regulatory frameworks, national capacities, strengthening early warning and data systems, and span critical and social infrastructure sectors, including - Energy, Water and Sanitation, Telecommunications, Housing, Transport, Health, Education, and Coastal Infrastructure.

CDRI in collaboration with IRIS project implementing partners are hosting a series of Learning Webinars to highlight milestones, impacts, key takeaways, lessons learned, and next steps of IRIS first cohort projects that will reach operational closure in 2026. Commencing in August 2026, the webinars will be hosted on DRI Connect (CDRI’s knowledge exchange, learning and collaborative platform) once a month to share knowledge, good practices, and foster peer-to-peer learning in SIDS regions.

The first webinar in this series will spotlight the project titled ‘Multi-threat Early Warning System in the Dominican Republic’ which is being implemented by Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) along with the government partner Emergency Operations Centre (COE). The project enhances risk and vulnerability data management to strengthen emergency operations and support risk-informed infrastructure planning. Key achievements of the project include:

• Integration of disaster risk data from multiple agencies into a national platform, enabling authorities to visualize risks at the neighbourhood level and identify critical infrastructure hotspots.
• Development of a National Framework for implementation of the Multi-Hazard Early Warning System (SAT-M), providing structured guidance for coordinated risk management across institutions.
• Establishment of a geospatial platform that enables risk assessment at neighbourhood and local levels, now serving as a national reference tool for emergency planning, preparedness, and operational decision making.
• Strengthened public alert dissemination and operational coordination through a modernized Emergency Operations Center (COE) control panel and functional upgrades to the ‘Alerta-COE’ mobile application.

This webinar will elaborate on the impact of the project and will focus on the key achievements, challenges faced, measures taken to overcome these, knowledge materials and outputs developed, lessons learned, and the outreach and scaling up strategies.