UN tsunami conference opens in Japan
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-01-18 13:36

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan makes an opening remakrs through video at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, western Japan, Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2005. The conference is expected to focus on the creation of a tsunami warning system for countries around the Indian Ocean that were devastated by last month's earthquake-induced disaster. [AP]

A global conference on the tsunami catastrophe opened Tuesday amid calls for direct world action to prevent such natural events from becoming mass killers.

The gathering drew some 3,000 government officials, non-governmental experts and other specialists from around the world to find ways to reverse the growth in numbers of people affected by natural disasters.

"We must draw and act on every lesson we can," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told participants in the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, which opened with a moment of silence for more than 160,000 people killed in the Dec. 26 earthquake-tsunami that ravaged coasts across southern Asia.

"The world looks to this conference to help make communities and nations more resilient in the face of natural disasters," Annan said in his videotaped message.

The earthquake and tsunami has focused new attention on the long-planned U.N. conference, where delegates are expected to work on plans for a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean similar to one on guard for killer waves in the Pacific.

"The best way we can honor the dead is to protect the living," U.N. emergency relief chief Jan Egeland said at the start of the five-day World Conference on Disaster Reduction.

"We must meet today to take on this challenge with renewed urgency and vigor, knowing that we must translate words into deeds and good intentions into concrete actions."

Japan's Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko were among the dignitaries attending the opening ceremony in the port city of Kobe — the site of a magnitude 7.3 earthquake 10 years ago that killed almost 6,500 people and showed the world the vulnerability of metropolises to natural disasters.

The mournful people of Kobe marked the date — Jan. 17, 1995 — with a candlelight vigil and other ceremonies. But arriving conference delegates found a city on the rebound, with new shopping centers and office buildings, and many new homes in neighborhoods leveled by fire 10 years ago.

By one measure — the impact on populations — natural disasters are on the rise, U.N. officials report. They say more than 2.5 billion people were affected by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other such events between 1994 and 2003, a 60 percent increase over the numbers of the previous two 10-year periods. More than 478,000 people were killed in such disasters in 1994-2003.

Dozens of conference sessions will take up such subjects as "building safer communities against disaster" and educating the public on flood risks. Exhibitors, meanwhile, will show their disaster wares, from backpack-sized floodlights to new seismic intensity meters and "tsunami refuge towers."

Led by Australia, Germany and Japan, the world's nations have pledged more than $5 billion to help survivors of last month's tsunami, particularly in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Symposium participants praised the generous reaction, but Egeland, a U.N. undersecretary-general, said before the conference that he has "become more and more convinced that much more attention has to be given to disaster prevention and preparedness. We need to be more than a fire brigade."

The conference agenda is heavy with discussions of hazard assessment, public awareness campaigns and international cooperation, such as in building stronger systems to detect tsunamis, a relatively rare occurrence of massive waves triggered by undersea earthquakes, and to alert coastal populations to the danger.

Michael Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, noted at the symposium that last summer's string of Caribbean hurricanes caused relatively few casualties in the United States and Cuba, which have well-rehearsed evacuation plans, while they killed almost 3,000 people in impoverished Haiti, "telling us the importance of preventive measures."

In a keynote speech, Bangladesh's minister for food and disaster management, Chowdhury Kamal Ibne Yusuf, said it is vital to improve people's economic situation, so they can build better homes in areas not so vulnerable as his nation's Bay of Bengal islands, regularly devastated by cyclones.

"We can't stop the disasters, but definitely we can reduce the risk of people who are vulnerable to disaster," he said.

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