Governments around the world must work together to build early warning systems that can cut death tolls from natural disasters like the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 59,000, U.N. experts said on Tuesday. And investment in broad education programmes is also vital so that ordinary people -- especially in coastal areas where catastrophe often hits hardest -- know what to do when alerted that calamity is on the way, they warned. "The international community has to move ahead and build global systems to avoid a repeat of what has happened in Asia this week," Reid Basher of the U.N. Platform for the Promotion of Early Warning (PPEW) in Bonn told Reuters. He said that would now be a key topic at a long-planned World Conference on Disaster Reduction on Jan. 18-22 in Kobe, Japan, site of a massive earthquake in January 1995 which killed more than 6,400 people. Latest official figures put death toll above 59,000 and rising from the giant waves that hit up to a dozen countries and island states around the Indian Ocean and east Africa after an undersea earthquake off Indonesia on Sunday. The tsunami killed poor local fishermen and their families in coastal communities as well as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of foreign tourists underlining to global aspect of the tragedy. --More 2258 Local Time 1958 GMT
