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

Bonn Bonn () is a federal city in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, located on the banks of the Rhine. With a population exceeding 300,000, it lies about south-southeast of Cologne, in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr region. This ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. It developed increasing importance in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 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 the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

(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 of around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's List of Japanese cities by population, seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Port of Toky ...

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

. The UN programme would help improve prevention and resilience to all types of

natural disaster A natural disaster is the very harmful impact on a society or community brought by natural phenomenon or Hazard#Natural hazard, hazard. Some examples of natural hazards include avalanches, droughts, earthquakes, floods, heat waves, landslides ...

s, including droughts,

wildfires A wildfire, forest fire, or a bushfire is an unplanned and uncontrolled fire in an area of Combustibility and flammability, combustible vegetation. Depending on the type of vegetation present, a wildfire may be more specifically identified as a ...

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 of significant con ...

typhoons A typhoon is a tropical cyclone that develops between 180° and 100°E in the Northern Hemisphere and which produces sustained hurricane-force winds of at least . This region is referred to as the Northwestern Pacific Basin, accounting for a ...

hurricanes A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm system with a low-pressure area, a closed low-level atmospheric circulation, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain and squalls. Depending on its locat ...

, landslides,

volcanoes A volcano is commonly defined as a vent or fissure 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 fo ...

and

tsunamis A tsunami ( ; from , ) 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 underwater explosions (including detonations, la ...

, 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, like the one that exists for the volcano-and-earthquake prone Pacific Rim, had been operational in the

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or approximately 20% of the water area of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia (continent), ...

. 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, 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