UN announces plan for worldwide warnings

As natural disasters have grown more powerful and frequent due to climate change, the head of the United Nations announced a plan on Wednesday to bring weather warnings to every person on Earth within five years. Antonio Guterres, the U.N. Secretary-General said the project with the World Meteorological Organization aims to make the alert systems already used by many rich countries available to the developing world. Monitoring atmospheric conditions in real-time on land and at sea allows early warning systems to predict weather events wherever they occur - in cities, rural areas, mountainous areas, coastal areas, as well as arid areas.

World Meteorological Day 2022 took place on March 23rd, with this year's theme being 'early warning and early action.'

Because of climate change, making more use of these systems is crucial, because more lead time allows people to prepare for potentially deadly disasters like heat waves, forest fires, flooding, and tropical storms. Last year, the World Meteorological Organization published a disaster statistics report that showed climate or water-related disasters occurred daily on average over the last half-century, causing an average of 115 deaths and $202 million in damage. Just this year the world has seen extreme weather events in Italy, Mozambique, and in the U.S. The United Nations, its partners, and many governments are working to reach an increasingly elusive target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The UN secretary-general has instructed WMO, the organization's meteorological agency, to develop an early warning system action plan to present to the UN summit on climate change in November. In addition to building on some of its existing programs, WMO will create an early warning system that helps inform people most at risk of some kinds of disaster, the U.N. said.

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