Fuente : World Bank
http://www.worldbank.org

Tsunami Warning System To Be Set Up By End Of 2006

/noticias.info/
Experts from the United Nations and Indian Ocean countries agreed to set up a tsunami warning system at a five-day meeting at UNESCO's headquarters in Paris to prevent a repeat of the catastrophe that struck on December 26, UNESCO said, reports The Associated Press. A fully functioning system that detects undersea earthquakes and broadcasts warnings to coastal communities is expected to be in place by the end of 2006, said Patricio Bernal, executive secretary of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, on Tuesday.


Agence France Presse explains that countries will receive seismic data from April 1 from earthquake monitoring stations in Tokyo and Hawaii. In the medium term, technicians will set up tidal gauges at six sites in the eastern Indian Ocean, mainly near Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, and upgrade 15 existing gauge sites elsewhere in the region, he said. The instruments will be on the lookout for large waves 24 hours a day, seven days a week, providing a rudimentary alert system for tsunamis "from October-November," said Bernal. The final step is a sophisticated system around the Indian Ocean that will comprise a regional warning centre and a network of seabed sensors and gauges, which in turn will alert 26 national tsunami warning centers. Bernal said two important aspects of the Indian Ocean scheme remain to be settled. One is where to locate the regional warning centre. France, for one, has suggested it be on the French island department of La Reunion. However, one idea floated in the Paris meeting is to divide some of the future center's responsibilities among several sites. The other unresolved question is how much the system will cost.


Countries also expressed their eagerness to set up tsunami warning systems for the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas, Bernal said. China and the Philippines especially urged the creation of a system for the South China Sea. Reid Basher, a senior advisor at the UN's International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, emphasized that, in any region, technology was only one part of the solution. "Countries still have to get the educational issue resolved," he said, pointing to the need for countries to have an effective national alert system and train citizens to respond to it.


The Associated Press adds that a second UNESCO-sponsored meeting will be held next month in Mauritius to finalize policy matters and broach divisive questions, including whether one country would host a disaster warning center or if the responsibilities would be distributed across the region. Member states plan to meet in June to formally adopt the plan, but work is getting under way immediately.


In related news, Le Figaro (France) reports that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the European Union are meeting in Jakarta today and tomorrow to discuss tsunami reconstruction efforts. Margareta Wahlstrom, coordinator at the United Nations, says that about $1.7 billion have been raised by the Red Cross and Red Crescent, but so far, only $150 million have been used. In total, the international aid received could be as high as $10 billion, though it appears that the real economic impact of the tsunami will be limited. The World Bank estimates that the tsunami should not cost Asia more than 0.4 growth points, and that Indonesia will experience a five percent growth rate over the next year. However, the reconstruction of the province of Aceh represents a real challenge, notes the daily. As it was ravaged by the tsunami, it will have to be entirely rebuilt and therefore will be a first test for Indonesia in its efforts to decentralize. Its reconstruction will symbolize both the future of the region’s installations and the autonomy Indonesian regions will be granted.


Xinhua (China) finally reports that Indonesia has asked major creditors grouping in the Paris Club for interest-free loans with shorter period, Indonesian Minister of Finance Jusuf Anwar said Tuesday. He noted creditor countries have responded to his letters and informed that the matter will be discussed during the group's gathering on Wednesday. Anwar didn't elaborate how much loans Indonesia plans to take on from the Paris Club. A one-year debt moratorium could save spending by up to $2 million in the state budget and that is "very convenient to the budget," he said. The news agency also notes that Italy agreed on Wednesday to convert some $32 million Indonesian debt into a debt swap, which could be used to help reconstruction in Indonesia's tsunami-hit of Aceh and North Sumatra provinces.

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