Thursday, June 14, 2012

Making Emergency Communication Effective


3rd LIRNEasia's Disaster Risk Reduction Public Lecture

19 June 2012 15:00 – 17:00
Sri Lanka Foundation Institute, 100 Independent Square, Colombo 07


Please join us to discuss how to improve disaster risk reduction practices.

There is a growing need to dilute inter-agency rivalry and foster lateral integration for sharing of risk information for effective response. To that end, the public lecture will focus on actions to improve alerting and situational-reporting between agencies. Thereby, reducing the decision-maker's loss functions; namely, reduction of false and missed alarms, stakeholder losses, and policy-maker losses. A proven action would be to establish an emergency communication profile for Sri Lanka and and implementing a multi-agency situational-awareness software tool. Such a tool and procedures can help bring organizations together to better communicating risk information and ease them away from unproductive silo thinking. It will also allow the national Disaster Management Center to better regulate those communications.

The main speaker is LIRNEasia's Senior Research Fellow: Nuwan Waidyanatha. He has strong credentials in disaster management, especially with emergency communication and early warning systems design, development, and experimentation. His research is highly regarded and continuously promoted by international organizations such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Organization for the Advancement of Standardized Information Systems (OASIS) and the United Nations System for Influenza Coordination (UNSIC). Additionally, disaster management researchers and practitioners from the North Americas and the Asia Pacific consult to benefit from his first hand knowledge in the subject

The Panelists: Prof. Dileeka Dias, (Director, University of Moratuwa Dialog Mobile Communications Research Laboratory), Mr. Mifan Careem (Chief Executive Officer, Respere Lanka), and Dr. Buddhi Weerasinghe (independent Regional Disaster Management Consultant) will complement the main talk with their contributions in strengthening Sri Lanka's disaster management capabilities.


LIRNEasia s premier CSR activity intended to advance knowledge about good disaster risk reduction practices in Sri Lanka and the region.