The International Early Warning Program (IEWP), was first proposed at the Second International Early Warning Conference (EWCII) in 2003 in

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ru ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),, is a country in Central Europe. It is the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the sou ...

. It developed increasing importance in the wake of the

2004 Indian Ocean tsunami An earthquake and a tsunami, known as the Boxing Day Tsunami and, by the scientific community, the Sumatra–Andaman earthquake, occurred at 07:58:53 local time (UTC+7) on 26 December 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of northern Sum ...

, which claimed over 200,000 lives and injured over half a million people.

History

In January 2005, the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmonizi ...

(UN) launched extensive plans to create a global warning system to lessen the impact of deadly natural disasters at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, held in

Kobe Kobe ( , ; officially , ) is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture Japan. With a population around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Tokyo and Yokohama. It is located in Kansai region, w ...

, Japan. The UN programme would help improve

prevention Prevention may refer to: Health and medicine * Preventive healthcare, measures to prevent diseases or injuries rather than curing them or treating their symptoms General safety * Crime prevention, the attempt to reduce deter crime and crimi ...

and resilience to all types of natural disasters, including

droughts A drought is defined as drier than normal conditions.Douville, H., K. Raghavan, J. Renwick, R.P. Allan, P.A. Arias, M. Barlow, R. Cerezo-Mota, A. Cherchi, T.Y. Gan, J. Gergis, D. Jiang, A. Khan, W. Pokam Mba, D. Rosenfeld, J. Tierney, an ...

wildfires A wildfire, forest fire, bushfire, wildland fire or rural fire is an unplanned, uncontrolled and unpredictable fire in an area of combustible vegetation. Depending on the type of vegetation present, a wildfire may be more specifically identi ...

floods A flood is an overflow of water (list of non-water floods, or rarely other fluids) that submerges land that is usually dry. In the sense of "flowing water", the word may also be applied to the inflow of the tide. Floods are an area of study o ...

typhoons A typhoon is a mature tropical cyclone that develops between 180° and 100°E in the Northern Hemisphere. This region is referred to as the Northwestern Pacific Basin, and is the most active tropical cyclone basin on Earth, accounting for ...

hurricanes A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm, storm system characterized by a Low-pressure area, low-pressure center, a closed low-level atmospheric circulation, Beaufort scale, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms tha ...

landslides Landslides, also known as landslips, are several forms of mass wasting that may include a wide range of ground movements, such as rockfalls, deep-seated slope failures, mudflows, and debris flows. Landslides occur in a variety of environments, ...

volcanoes A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where tectonic plates a ...

and

tsunamis A tsunami ( ; from ja, 津波, lit=harbour wave, ) is a series of waves in a water body caused by the displacement of a large volume of water, generally in an ocean or a large lake. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other underwater expl ...

, by using a comprehensive set of methods including rapid information sharing and training communities at risk. It is believed that the loss of human life would have been dramatically reduced, if a

tsunami warning system A tsunami warning system (TWS) is used to detect tsunamis in advance and issue the warnings to prevent loss of life and damage to property. It is made up of two equally important components: a network of sensors to detect tsunamis and a communic ...

, like the one that exists for the volcano-and-earthquake prone

Pacific Rim The Pacific Rim comprises the lands around the rim of the Pacific Ocean. The '' Pacific Basin'' includes the Pacific Rim and the islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Rim roughly overlaps with the geologic Pacific Ring of Fire. List of ...

, had been operational in the

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by ...

. Technology, such as tremor and tidal gauges, fast data transfer and alarm mechanisms, used in combination with training in the danger zones, would have given hundreds of thousands of people time to move to the safety of higher ground. Early warning systems are now widely recognized as worthwhile and necessary investments to help save lives. In 2004, millions of people in the Americas and Asia were evacuated when tropical storms struck, which saved thousands of lives. According to Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the

World Meteorological Organisation The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. The WMO originated from the Interna ...

, about 90% of all natural disasters were caused by hazards related to weather and water. Speaking at the conference, he said: "It is WMO's aim to halve the number of deaths due to natural disasters of meteorological, hydrological and climatic origin over the next 15 years, more specifically to reduce by half the associated ten-year average fatality from the period 1995-2004 to the period 2010-2019 for these disasters." There was unanimous support among participants to the January 2005 conference, as an initial step towards an International Early Warning Programme, for UN-led efforts to establish an Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System.

References

{{authority control Warning systems Emergency organizations Geological hazards Organizations established by the United Nations

History

See also

References