Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley wants Defence Ministers from the Americas to devise new avenues to improve preparation and cooperation to mitigate hardships after natural disasters.
Rowley said that at yesterday's opening of the Twelfth Conference of Defence Ministers in the Americas at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Port-of-Spain.
The conference two-day conference is being chaired by National Security Minister Edmund Dillon.
Rowley said Caribbean States have, over the past years, experienced "significant misfortune" from natural disasters, including Hurricane Erika which swept Dominica in August last year and Hurricane Matthew, which claimed over 800 hundreds lives and caused "havoc" in Haiti last week.
"That tragic event required humanitarian emergency assistance from the region and the wider international community," adding that similar events across the globe in the past year have "visited the developed, the developing, the land-locked and on the coastal and island states," he said.
Rowley told Defence Ministers that the "current situation requires of us new and different perspectives, a paradigm shift."
Rowley, who has lead responsibility for security in Caricom, said it was not enough to say "we have invested in the acquisition of military assets (or) that we have amassed armaments and are at the cutting edge of defence technology."
He said it was also "not enough to say that we have strengthened our armed forces."
Rowley said biennial meetings of the CDMA were also not enough. He insisted: "The wave of new threats, which threaten this era, demands nothing less than our undivided attention to the institutionalization of robust mechanisms for information sharing, continuous cooperation and collaboration."
He stressed those requirements were not needed next year or next month but "now".
Theme of the conference was "Strengthening Defence and Security Cooperation in the hemisphere in an increasingly volatile global environment," and one of the major objectives of the conference was to foster mutual knowledge, analysis, debate and exchange of ideas and experiences on defence and security matters.
T&T was the first Caricom nation to host the CDMA which is made up of 34 member states from the Caribbean and the Americas. Cuba is not a member of the grouping as the US embargo on the Caribbean nation remains in effect.
Rowley expressed disappoint over Cuba's absence from the meeting, which seeks to promote co-operation and collaboration among member countries regardless of certain differences.
Dillon in his remarks also called for assistance to be provided to Haiti in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. He said he was confident the meeting will "achieve meaningful outcomes."