Eleventh Session of the ICG/IOTWMS

The eleventh session of the Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (ICG/IOTWMS-XI) was held in Putrajaya, Malaysia, 18-20 April 2017 under the Chairmanship of Dr. Juma Al-Maskari. The Session was attended by 30 delegates from 6 Member States in the Indian Ocean region, 2 UN agencies and other organisations, and 13 observers. Two additional UN agencies participated through Skype. The ICG/IOTWMS is grateful to the Government of Malaysia for the excellent host arrangements.

The elected officers for the next intersessional term are Chair Dr. Andi Eka Sakya (Indonesia) and Vice Chairs Dr. Juma Al-Maskari (Oman) and Prof. Sam Hettiarachchi (Sri Lanka).

The ICG/IOTWMS decided to continue to place greater emphasis on community awareness and preparedness to help ensure more appropriate responses to tsunami warning information. To this end, the ICG established a new inter sessional Task Team on “Capacity Assessment of Tsunami Preparedness” to oversee capacity assessment of tsunami preparedness, develop guidelines and pilot implementation of a Tsunami Ready programme in the Indian Ocean. It decided to continue Working Group 1 on Tsunami Risk, Community Awareness and Preparedness; Working Group 2 on Tsunami Detection, Warning and Dissemination; and the Sub-Regional Working Group for the North West Indian Ocean. A Task Team on Exercise Indian Ocean Wave 2018 (IOWave18) was also established to plan for and organise an Indian Ocean wide tsunami exercise in September 2018.

In order to optimise resources, the ICG/IOTWMS decided to hold integrated meetings including intersessional meetings of the Steering Group, Working Groups and Task Teams as well as Workshops on Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and Indian Ocean Tsunami Information Centre (IOTIC) training initiatives. The ICG noted with appreciation Indonesia’s kind offer to host the first integrated meeting in July 2017 and India’s kind offer to host the second integrated meeting in April 2018.

The ICG/IOTWMS decided to hold its twelfth session in early 2019 and accepted with appreciation the offer from the Islamic Republic of Iran to host it.

Meeting documents and presentations are available at www.ioc-tsunami.org/iotwms-11.