KINGSTON, Jamaica — Against the backdrop of smoke-filled Canadian skies and a global economy in flux, Jamaica’s Minister of Tourism, Edmund Bartlett, recently declared that the world has entered “the Age of Resilience” – and said the survival of tourism now depends on financing people, not just properties.

Addressing the Canadian-Caribbean Tourism Resilience Symposium in Toronto, Canada against the backdrop of huge climate change induced forest fires raging in that country, Bartlett said climate disasters, geopolitical conflict, cyber threats and artificial intelligence are no longer arriving one at a time, they are converging.

“The fires in Canada are not only a Canadian story. They are a mirror held up to the world,” Bartlett told diplomats, industry leaders and diaspora representatives. “They tell us that the world has changed. Not temporarily, not superficially, fundamentally.”