Governance
Tsunami Ready Programme: UNESCO-IOC
- 07 Aug 2020
- 4 min read
Why in News
Recently, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO (also known as UNESCO-IOC) has approved the recognition of two communities of Odisha viz., Venkatraipur and Noliasahi as Tsunami Ready Communities.
- With this recognition, India has become the first country in the Indian Ocean Region to achieve the honor from the UNESCO-IOC.
- Odisha is the first state in India to have such recognised communities.
Key Points
- Tsunami Ready:
- It 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.
- Implementation in India:
- Tsunami Ready in India is implemented by the National Board (Ministry of Earth Sciences- MoES) under the Chairmanship of Director, Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Centre (INCOIS) with members drawn from MoES, National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), Odisha State Disaster Management Authority (OSDMA), Andaman & Nicobar Islands Directorate of Disaster Management (DDM) and INCOIS.
- INCOIS (an autonomous body under the Ministry of Earth sciences) is also providing tsunami advisories to Indian Ocean region (25 countries) as a Tsunami Service Provider as the responsibility assigned by UNESCO-IOC.
- The Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC), INCOIS is the nodal agency to provide tsunami advisories to India. It is coordinating with the Disaster Management Officials (DMOs) for implementation of Tsunami Ready programme in India.
- It conducts IOWave Tsunami mock exercises biannually in coordination with ICG/IOTWMS and also conducts mock exercises at national level in alternative years in coordination with MHA and NDMA and State Disaster Management Agencies (SDMA) to strengthen the readiness to handle the emergency situations with stakeholders.
Tsunamis
- These are a series of waves usually generated by movement of the sea floor. These movements are caused by different types of geophysical phenomena such as earthquakes, landslides and volcanic eruptions.
- The word tsunami is a Japanese word, represented by two characters: tsu, meaning, "harbor", and nami meaning, "wave".
- The tsunami waves behave very differently in deep water than in shallow water as their speed is related to the water depth.
- They frequently occur in the Pacific, where dense oceanic plates slide under the lighter continental plates. When these plates fracture they provide a vertical movement of the seafloor that allows a quick and efficient transfer of energy from the solid earth to the ocean.
