The United Nations chief announced the development, with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva on Wednesday, of bringing all the peoples of the earth within five years for an early-warning system that would have become stronger and more frequent as natural disasters attributed to climate change.
General Antonio Guterres said the project, with the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization, will focus on supplying the warning systems that are used by many rich countries to developing countries.
The Early Warning Systems enable real-time monitoring of atmospheric conditions at sea and on dry land to predict future weather events, be they urban, rural, mountain, coastal, arid, nor polar regions.
Expansion of their exploitation is growing in necessity, as faster people are equipped to prepare for potentially fatal disasters such as heat waves, wildfires, flooding and tropical storms caused by climate change.
A World Meteorology Organization report on disaster statistics published last year shows that, on average every day over the last roughly half-century, a climatic or water-attributable catastrophe has happened, resulting in an average of 115 deaths and $202 million of daily losses.
Guterres has instructed the U.N. meteorological agency (WMO) to submit an “action plan” for an “early warning system” for the next U.N. climate talks on November in Egypt.
The WMO plans to build on some of its existing programmes, including a warning system for threatened areas like tropical cyclones, floods and coastal flooding and an early warning system, which helped inform the most vulnerable to certain types of disaster, the UN said.
