Meeting agrees on tsunami alert system

Meeting agrees on tsunami alert system

Elaine Lies, Reuters, Kobe, Japan

Experts and officials from around the world agreed to try to cut the number of deaths in disasters over the next decade and promised to set up a tsunami warning system at a conference that ended on Saturday.

But aid workers said the framework agreement, which the United Nations hopes will halve the number of people killed in natural disasters, lacked detail on the steps needed to achieve its aims.

The death of more than 225,000 people in last month's Indian Ocean tsunami had made an early warning system a top priority at the five-day UN-sponsored conference on disaster reduction in the Japanese city of Kobe.

"All disaster-prone people deserve to have early warning systems," Jan Egeland, the UN's director of Emergency Relief, told a news conference.

The huge Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami it spawned had made everyone in the world aware of the need for aid to reduce disaster risk.

"The tsunami was the wake-up call for all of us," he said.

UN officials have promised to have a warning system up and running in the Indian Ocean within 12 to 18 months, and Salvano Briceno, head of the UN's disaster reduction body, said about $8 million had been pledged for the system.

About $4 million of that is from Japan, whose long history of earthquakes and devastating tsunamis has prompted it to set up a system that aims to issue a warning within three minutes, expertise it has pledged to use in the new system.

The main purpose of the meeting was convincing wealthy donor countries to invest small amounts of aid in the hope of reducing death and destruction when disaster strikes in developing nations.

The conference in Kobe, where 6,433 people were killed in an earthquake a decade ago, adopted a framework agreement to be implemented over the next 10 years.

Among steps outlined in the agreement are cooperating to develop risk maps, the use of satellite technology to help with early warning and developing programs to teach people in hazardous areas what to do when a warning is issued, something experts at the meeting said was especially needed.

HALVING DEATHS

Egeland reiterated his hope of halving the number of deaths from natural disasters over the next decade. About 600,000 people were victims of natural disasters over the last 10 years, but that was down by a third from the previous decade.

"I think it is achievable," Egeland said. "We are counting thousands of new deaths a day due to the tsunami. Those lives, for the better part, would have been saved if we had the early warning system."

Officials had worked late into the night to hammer out details of the statements, a process some delegates said was hampered by disagreement over measures to hold governments to promises and whether to require nations to pay a fixed amount to reduce the danger of disasters before they happen.

Aid workers welcomed the agreement on the early warning system but said the framework agreement lacked concrete details of how its ambitious goals were to be achieved.

"You have to ask whether this conference and its outcomes have honored those who died in the Asian earthquake and tsunamis," Eva von Oelreich of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement.

"Have they brought hope to the survivors and to other vulnerable people that soon the day will come when the chance of such horror occurring again will have been reduced to the minimum?"

Differences even appeared to have emerged over the tsunami warning system.

Numerous proposals have emerged about the best system to adopt, and some delegates fear countries are jockeying for leadership of the high-profile project.

UN officials have denied rivalry and say their organization will coordinate the process as details are worked out.