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| Sunday, 16 January 2005 |
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A global warning system - the need TOKYO, Jan 15 (Reuters) U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said he wants to aim for a global early warning system that covers not just tsunamis but a wide range of natural disasters, a Japanese newspaper reported on Saturday. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has championed a worldwide tsunami warning system and donors have been willing to fund it since the Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 162,000 people. Setting up an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system will be a major topic at a U.N.-sponsored conference on reducing the toll from disasters to be held in the western Japanese city of Kobe next week. "An early warning system should be able to deal with natural disasters that occur almost every year and not just tsunamis that only occur very rarely," the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted Egeland - who is to attend the Kobe conference - as saying in an interview at the U.N. headquarters in New York. In addition to tsunamis, an alert system should be equipped to deal with disasters such as droughts, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes, the Mainichi quoted Egeland as saying. Egeland said he wanted to launch a network of U.N. and other agencies at the Kobe meeting that would aim at building the warning system, Mainichi said. The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, World Food Programme and other agencies have already agreed to set up a scheme for purposes such as exchanging information, he said. |
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