The global call to action on emergency alerting

Despite today's amazing telecommunications services, too many people in harm's way still do not get timely and effective emergency alerts so they can protect lives and livelihoods. This is largely because traditional emergency alerts are bulletins or press releases, composed of unstructured text and not well suited to automated processing. Timely and effective emergency alerting across all media only became feasible in 2001, when the international standard Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) was agreed.

Today, 74% of the world's population lives in a country with at least one national CAP news feed operating. Yet, a large percentage of countries without CAP are "developing countries". Sadly, those countries are especially vulnerable to disasters. 

Recognizing this CAP implementation gap, international organizations, international NGOs, and international companies involved in emergency alerting are urged to endorse the Call to Action on Emergency Alerting: 
   "To scale up efforts to ensure that by 2025 all countries have the capability  for effective, authoritative emergency alerting that leverages CAP".

This session features five panelists, each representing a major international organization that has endorsed this Call to Action:

• International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)
• International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
• United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)
• World Broadcasting Unions (WBU)
• World Meteorological Organization (WMO)

Each Panelist will bring their perspective on the Call to Action, explaining how they are pursuing the objective as well as what challenges and opportunities they foresee.

The Moderator will briefly note the ongoing efforts of the other fourteen endorsers of the Call to Action on Emergency Alerting: AccuWeather, Alert-Hub.Org CIC (Community Interest Company), Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, EUMETNET MeteoAlarm, European Emergency Number Association, Everbridge, Google, International Association of Emergency Managers, Meteoblue, OASIS Open, Open Commons Consortium, OpenBroadcaster, Traveller Information Services Association, and Vint Cerf (as an individual))

Time

14:00 - 15:00 (UTC-02:00)