KOBE -- Thanks to intense international political heat, the Indian Ocean region will get a tsunami early warning within three years. But more fundamental issues related to disaster reduction remain on the back burner, resulting in a lost opportunity.
That's the view expressed by numerous delegates to the United Nations Conference on Disaster Reduction, which closed Saturday.
The five-day conference, having been scheduled since early last year, was originally supposed to be an opportunity to review a comprehensive United Nations strategy for disaster reduction methods called the Yokohama Strategy, which was adopted in 1994.