Professor Dilanthi Amaratunga was a guest speaker at the launch of the Tsunami Ready Community Programme in Sri Lanka. The initiative is being led by the State Ministry of Disaster Management and Disaster Management Centre of Sri Lanka. The Global Disaster Resilience Centre at the University of Huddersfield is a partner. This discussion on piloting the Tsunami Ready programme took place on 20th April 2022, and was opened by Major General (Ret’d) Fernando, Secretary to the State Ministry of Disaster Management, and Major General (Ret’d) Sudantha Ranasinghe, Director General of the Disaster Management Center.
The event included discussions on the IOC-UNESCO IOTWMS Indian Ocean Tsunami Ready programme, and the modalities associated with its implementation in Sri Lanka. Tsunami Ready is a community performance-based programme initiated by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO to promote tsunami preparedness through active collaboration of public, community leaders, and national and local emergency management agencies.
The main objective of this programme is to improve coastal community’s preparedness for tsunami emergencies, to minimize the loss of life and property and to ensure a structural and systematic approach in building community preparedness through fulfilling the best-practice indicators set by the Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (ICG/IOTWMS) of UNESCO-IOC.
The initiative will also be an opportunity to share with Sri Lanka some of this project’s findings from Indonesia and an international desk study on localisation of tsunami early warning. In doing so it will form an important part of the project’s wider dissemination efforts.
