The International Early Warning Programme (IEWP), was first proposed at the Second International Conference on Early Warning in 2003 in Bonn, Germany. It developed increasing importance in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which claimed 300,000 lives and injured over half a million people.

In January 2005 the United Nations (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, Japan. The U.S. denied wanting to dominate warning-system plans.[1]

The UN programme would help improve resilience to all types of natural disaster, including droughts, wildfires, floods, typhoons, hurricanes, landslides, volcanoes and tsunamis, by using a combination of fast data transmission and training populations at risk from such natural hazards.

Such measures could have saved thousands of lives in the tsunami disaster. 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. 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 recognised 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 are of meteorological origin. Speaking at the conference, he said: ‘We aim to halve the number of deaths due to water-related disasters over the next 15 years by improving alerting systems for weather and water events through risk assessment, hazard detection, awareness raising and education about disaster prevention of communities at risk.’[2]

There was unanimous support among participants to the January 2005 conference, as an initial step towards an International Early Warning Programme, for U.N.-led efforts to establish an Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System.[3]