Bangkok--5 Sep--Asian Institute of Technology
Timely alerts can contribute towards lessening the impact of disaster and saving numerous lives. Situational Awareness also helps disaster managers to track significant emergency incidents and share this information across multiple agencies.
This was the main theme of the two-day international workshop on Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) held at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) on 23-24 August 2016. Organized jointly by AIT and the Sahana Software Foundation, the workshop had 80 experts hailing from 20 countries participating in the event. Co-sponsored by International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), International Telecommunication Union (ITU), OASIS Emergency Management, and World Meteorological Organization (WMO), this was the ninth such workshop to be organized on CAP.
Welcoming the participants, Mr. Surendra Shrestha, AIT's Vice President for Development, stated that AIT is following a holistic integrated approach towards global issues, and it is actively engaged with issues like climate change, sustainability and the impact of urbanization.
Mr. Omar Abou-Samra of IFRC's Global Disaster Preparedness Center (GDPC) mentioned that the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) was a key component in their strategy to save lives. Ms. Elysa Jones, who is the Chair of the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee, stressed the need to maintain common data standards including message distribution and resource messaging.
Mr. Devin Balkind, President, Sahana Software Foundation, spoke about applying FLO methodologies to civic challenges by developing and deploying software tools and operational techniques.
Samuel Muchemi of Public Weather Services (SO/PWS), WMO mentioned the commitment of governments in promoting CAP. "When 192 member countries pass a resolution to adopt a standard, then it automatically gets traction," he remarked. Samuel highlighted the role played by WMO in advocacy, stating that they were using the Public Private Partnership model to promote CAP. He also elaborated on the role of the World Weather Information Service and the Severe Weather Information Centre.
Eliot Christian, former chief architect of the WMO Information System and the Global Earth Observations System of Systems (GEOSS), shared his experience on promoting CAP during the past 15 years. Nuwan Waidyanatha,Director, Sahana Software Foundation Board, presented lessons learnt from the Sahana Alerting and Messaging system. Universal application progress, shared ownership model, no cost to national societies adopting CAP, first aid and multi-hazard applications were among the highlights of the presentation.
According to Dr. Manzul Hazarika, Director (Program Operations), Geoinformatics Center, AIT, participants came from both international organizations, governments, as well as the non-governmental and the private sector. Over 30 presentations were delivered at the two-day conference with the main objective being to enable countries in Asia-Pacific to manage situational awareness. Participants came from Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, French Polynesia, Switzerland, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Laos, Maldives, Mexico, Myanmar, Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, USA and Vietnam.