UN Official Eyes Wide Disaster Alert System
Date: 17-Jan-05
Country: JAPAN
UN 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 UN-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 UN 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 UN and other agencies at the Kobe meeting that would aim at building the warning system, Mainichi said.
The UN 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.
Separately, Kyodo news agency quoted Egeland as saying he expects the world's attention on the Indian Ocean tsunami to lead to concrete action in strengthening efforts to prevent damage caused by natural disasters.
"Some are afraid that this tsunami will overshadow the more frequent natural disasters" during the Kobe conference, Kyodo quoted Egeland as saying in a telephone interview on Saturday.
"However, on the contrary, I think the tsunami will make world leaders understand the importance of dealing more decisively with natural disaster prevention," Kyodo quoted Egeland as saying in an English-language report.