Humanitarian Early Warning Service

The World Food Program set up the IASC Humanitarian Early Warning Service (HEWSweb). This provides a web site reporting storms and natural hazards around the world. They provide world maps of Storms, Floods and Earthquakes. Unfortunately many of their news services say "not available at this time". In any case this is a service for slowly developing events effecting food crops and the like, not for rapidly developing events, such as Tsunami.

The IASC Humanitarian Early Warning Service (HEWSweb) is an inter-agency partnership project aimed at establishing a common platform for humanitarian early warnings and forecasts for natural hazards. The main objective of HEWSweb is to bring together and make accessible in a simple manner the most credible early warning information available at the global level from multiple specialized institutions.

The HEWSweb concept has been initially proposed by a subsidiary body of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (the IASC Sub-Working Group on Preparedness and Contingency Planning) and endorsed by the IASC-WG in September 2004. The service has been developed by the World Food Programme and its technical staff on behalf of the IASC, building on inputs from all IASC partners. The IASC Sub-Working Group on Preparedness and Contingency Planning is co-chaired by WFP and UNICEF.

From: About Us - IASC Humanitarian Early Warning Service, IASC SWG on Preparedness and Contingency Planning, World Food Programme, 2007