13 January 2005

To the Presidents of IAP Member Academies:

The dramatic and awful events which have struck hundreds of thousands of people in South Asia, bringing devastation to coastal areas in the Indian Ocean, at the end of December, have aroused an impressive sense of solidarity worldwide. The practical assistance and donations from around the world will help in feeding and caring for the survivors, rebuilding houses, schools, roads, harbours - but will not create renovated conditions for preventing, in the future, such huge tragedies. At this special time, the scientific community could and should make a unique contribution by providing expertised knowledge, information and even scientific experts for the affected countries to help with the on-going efforts to cure the tragedy in those countries. As a global network of world academies, we call on all our member academies to provide any possible scientific and technical help and support in every means for the affected countries.

The scientific community should concentrate on doing everything scientifically and technically possible in order to improve the forecast of natural disasters like earthquakes - a formidable challenge - but also to enhance the prompt dissemination of marine earthquakes and other relevant seismic information - an endeavour much easier to attain and altogether of crucial importance.
Many Academies of Sciences cannot launch their own research programmes on this subject, due to lack of resources and laboratories etc. But they can create at a national level the conditions for re-evaluating the priorities of the major national research agencies, and induce their government to devote new budgets to this theme, and participate in international cooperation in this field.

The IAP would not comply with its mission if it remained detached from this fight towards more safety for coastal populations. Therefore, this topic will be on the agenda of the next IAP Executive Committee meeting (Stockholm, 26-27 February), addressing such issues as effective monitoring networking, epidemic disease prevention, GIS calamity assessment, role of regional organizations (i.e. AASA, FASAS and NASIC).

Any advice, any suggestion, from your Academy will be welcome before this discussion takes place. We will keep you informed of any initiative taken.

Expressing our deepest sympathy to those of your Academies which were affected, directly or indirectly, by this disaster,

We remain, yours very truly

Chen Zhu, Yves Quéré
IAP Co-Chairs

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