Two publications, with chapters by LIRNEasia researcher Chanuka Wattegama, were launched during the GK3, third global Knowledge conferences held in Kuala Lumpur in December, 2007.

The biennial Digital Review of Asia Pacific is a comprehensive guide to the state-of-practice and trends in information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) in Asia Pacific. The third edition (2007/2008) covers 31 countries and economies, including North Korea for the first time. Each country chapter presents key ICT policies, applications and initiatives for national development. In addition, five thematic chapters provide a synthesis of some of the key issues in ICT4D in the region, including mobile and wireless technologies, risk communication, intellectual property regimes and localization.

Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book,  co-published by TVE Asia Pacific and the UNDP, brings together 21 authors – most of them from Asia – who share their experiences and insights on effective communication before, during and after disasters. Coming out in time for the third anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, it takes stock of communication lessons of the mega-disaster. Its core message: adequate planning can help avoid communications disasters when communicating about disasters. Edited by two leading Asian journalists – Nalaka Gunawardene and Frederick Noronha – the book carries a foreword by Sir Arthur C Clarke.

Intelligent planning and regulation make a huge difference to the number of people who die when disaster strikes, says Anna Tibaijuka, UN-Habitat’s executive director. In 1995 an earthquake in the Japanese city of Kobe killed 6,400 people; in 1999 a quake of similar magnitude in Turkey claimed over 17,000 lives. Corrupt local bureaucracies and slapdash building pushed up the Turkish toll.

The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which killed at least 230,000 people, would have been a tragedy whatever the level of preparedness; but even when disaster strikes on a titanic scale, there are many factors within human control—a knowledgeable population, a good early-warning system and settlements built with disasters in mind—that can help to minimise the number of casualties.

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People’s Daily Online — Nations progess on tsunami detection

Thailand launched the first of 22 US-made tsunami-detection buoys to be positioned around the Indian Ocean as part of a regional warning system against giant waves caused by earthquakes under the sea.

The satellite-linked deep-sea buoy, unveiled at a ceremony on the tsunami-hit island of Phuket, will float 1,000 kilometres offshore, roughly midway between Thailand and Sri Lanka.

“This will give us the capability to provide 1 hour warning to most of the countries in the northern part of the basin,” Curtis Barret of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

Washington donated the buoy, but Thailand will be responsible for its upkeep.

Under a similar arrangement, a second buoy will be installed in April 2007 off Sumatra in Indonesia, which bore the brunt of the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 which left more than 230,000 people dead or missing.

LIRNEasia has undertaken a number of initiatives in the area of ICTs disasters and early warning post the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster of 2004. However, this is by far the largest project undertaken LIRNEasia in this area to evaluate the suitability of a number of ICTs (information and communication technologies) deployed in varied conditions for their effectiveness in the last-mile of a hazard warning system.

This project is being conducted as a research project with the intention that the findings from this study will inform the future design of early warning systems in Sri Lanka and in the region. An experimental research design is being adopted to evaluate the role played by a number of factors that contribute to the design of an effective last mile hazard information dissemination system, they include the following factors:

1. Reliability of ICTs as warning technologies;
2. Effectiveness of ICTs as warning technologies;
3. Contribution of training to an effective warning response;
4. Contribution of the level of organizational development of a village to an effective warning response;
5. Gender-specific response to hazard mitigating action;
6. Degree of integration of ICTs in the daily life of villages;

The proposed research design, available as a PDF document, will allow one to compare the effectiveness of the various ICTs deployed in different village contexts and in the absence or presence of hazard response training. Different combinations of ICTs and community mobilization will be tested out in 32 participating villages from eastern, western, northern and southern coastal areas of Sri Lanka. Along with the deployment of ICTs in the villages, training will also be provided to the villagers: 1) to identify local hazards so that villagers can be source of hazard information for locally developing hazards and 2) training for undertaking, warning dissemination, evacuation and other relevant actions when a hazard is reported 3) as well as for coordinating post-disaster relief operations.

The first phase of the project was launched on April 3, 2006 with the training of trainers (ToT) program at Sarvodaya’s Development Educational Center in Bandaragama, Sri Lanka. The trainers who will be prepared at this workshop will be working with villagers in 32 tsunami affected villages along the coast of Sri Lanka to impart hazard identification, mitigation and evacuation training. 24 trainers from the Shanthi Sena Peace Brigade were selected from 6 coastal Districts: Trincomalee, Batticallo, Kalmunai, Ampara, Hambantota, Matara, Galle, Kalutara, and Colombo. TVEAP conducted the training sessions, Sarvodaya provided the facilities, and Vanguard Foundation recorded on video selected sections of the 7 day program.

The HazInfo Trainers spent 7 days at the Sarvodaya Development Center in Bandaragama learning the theory in a classroom, participating in group exercises, and engaging in outdoors activities in the spacious coconut land, which provided an ideal setting for the entire training program.

The last two days of the ToT program took the Trainers to the west coast village of Thalpitya, Wadduwa, a location that had been adversely affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, and approximately 16 kilometers south of the Sarvodaya’s Head Office in Moratuwa. On the first day in the field, the trainers spent time mapping the village, talking to people in the village to identify the most likely hazards, and building an emergency evacuation plan for the village of Thalpitiya.

The field activities were an educational experience for villagers as well as for the trainers. The public announcement instructing people to evacuate forgot to mention that “this is a drill …”. One part of the village panicked as a result. They were justifiably angry until the public announcement was corrected and until the public understood that it was a mock evacuation.

Thalpitiya Dalada Viharaya (Buddhist Temple), 1.6 km inland from the beach, was chosen by the Village and the HazInfo Trainers to be the common gathering place in the event of a disaster. After gathering at the temple the crowd spent time in a question and answer session with the HazInfo Trainers.

One of the Technology Partners – Dialog Telekom’s University of Moratuwa Mobile Communication Research Lab, demonstrated the Remote Alarm Device at the temple in Thalpitiya. People were thrilled to see a locally engineered GSM alerting device. The laboratory personnel also took the opportunity to get some feed-back from the HazInfo Trainers and Villages for improvements. Buddhi Weerasinghe (TVEAP) completed the ToT curriculum with a debriefing of the sessions that took place during the week.

Vanguard Foundation, the media partner for this project, has taken on the challenge of developing audio and video material as promotional and educational content in Sinhalese, Tamil, and English.

The exercises helped TVEAP and Vanguard to better define the role of the HazInfo Trainer. It was agreed that the role of the HazInfo trainer would be to promote their expertise in hazard mitigation to a community and enabling the community to self-develop a disaster preparedness plan for itself.

In the next phase of the project, HazInfo Trainers will provide training to 16 villages of the 32 selected villages as described in the research matrix in the project proposal: Evaluating a Last-Mile Hazard Dissemination: A Research Project.

Each HazInfo Trainer Team of 3 members will be training 2 villages in their district. The following villages have been selected for training: Samudragama, Thirukadalur, Kalmunei, Shithankudipuram, Saturakondan, Periyakallar, Mankarni, Kirinda, Modaragama, Urawatta, Brahamanawatta, Maddewatta, Kottegoda, Wadduwa, Panama-North, and Abeyasinghepura.

The training in these villages will be completed before the end of June 2006. The selected ICTs will be deployed thereafter and more simulated drills will be held to assess the relative effectiveness of the different last-mile hazard warning technologies. The project is scheduled to end in 2007.

My presentation was Expanding Access to ICTs (Powerpoint)

Along with Bill Melody’s forceful comments it clearly established the importance of market and regulatory reforms, a position that may otherwise have been deemphasized as a result of the Chair’s interest in subsidies.

The visit was also used to pursue the disaster warning-communication issues that have come to the fore in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. On the 18th of January I visited the Big Island’s Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center and the Pacific Tsunami Museum accompanied by Bill Melody and at the invitation of Dr George Curtis, a tsunami expert at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. On the following day, Peter Anderson, the expert we had recruited for the disaster warning work in Sri Lanka, and I visited the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at Ewa Beach, Oahu. The information gathered in these visits was written up as “Surviving tsunamis: Lessons we can learn from Hawai’i.” I am not attaching this article at this time because I hope to get it published in Sinhala and English in Sri Lanka shortly. This article has been circulated to contacts in tsunami-hit countries in the region as the first step in broadening the disaster warning-communication work.

On the 19th I made a plenary presentation (posted on website previously), “What happened in Sri Lanka and why it won’t be as bad next time.” I was one of four speakers at the closing plenary of the PTC 05 conference. The plenary was well attended. I established useful relations with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a result of the plenary and the related contacts.

The PTC event itself did not live up to (possibly unrealistic) expectations. It had lost a lot of the government, academic and first-tier telco participation that it had back in 1990 when I last attended. There was a dearth of significant fund-raising or academic collaboration opportunities as a result. However, signaling the presence of LIRNEasia as a player in the Asia Pacific and the contacts related to the disaster warning-communication work made the trip worthwhile.