Early Warning Systems

This presentation was given by Jessica Robbins on 18 October, 2019, at the CAP Implementation Workshop in Mexico City, Mexico. This presentation introduces how the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the Global Disaster Preparedness Center (GDPC) support multi-hazard early warning and public preparedness through digital tools and services that

This document concerns administrative operations for running the “CAP Editor” freeware. CAP Editor is a tool for creating and publishing emergency alerts in the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) format. CAP Editor runs on the Amazon Web Services cloud. 

This two-page flyer explains how public warning messages can be delivered quickly and at low cost to people online and on mobile devices—without requiring major new investments in specialized broadcast technology. It highlights examples of digital dissemination such as the Red Cross/Red Crescent “Hazards App,” Google Public Alerts, and the Federation for Internet Alerts, and

CAP Editor presents a link to CAP alert message templates in HTML that provide text suggestions for the “headline”, “description” and “instruction” elements of a CAP alert. These CAP alert message templates address about 20 common alerting situations. The templates are in English, Dutch, French, Papiamento, and Spanish.

This document annotates a screen-by-screen preview of the CAP Editor freeware, as it would be seen by a person authenticated in the role of “composer” or “approver”. 

This document provides an example template for the particular phrases (about 1,000 words total) that must be translated to enable the CAP Editor to customize its user interface. Translations to the new language are indicated by replacing the entries in the “French” column (noting that the words highlighted in yellow must remain in English). Once