Welcome to the 20th Anniversary of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) becoming an OASIS Open Standard in October 2004!
As of this writing, 87% of the world’s population lives in a country with at least one national-level CAP news feed.
This was the culmination of years of work on sharing information among various stakeholders. Initial development of CAP was spearheaded by the Partnership for Public Warning (PPW) in response to lessons learned from the terrorist attack on New York on September 11, 2001. This event, and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 that killed 238,000 people, highlighted the crucial need for better ways to communicate emergency alerts.
Through Eliot Christian’s efforts along with Elysa Jones, Chair of the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee and members, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) approved CAP in 2007 as their ITU-T Recommendation X.1303.
In 2006, the first CAP Workshop was hosted by ITU. Soon, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Organizations (IFRC), the United National Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), and many other international organizations, NGOs, and commercial companies embraced CAP as the essential standard for emergency alerting. With the leadership and evangelism of Eliot, CAP became known worldwide and CAP implementation by national governments was growing at 8% per year. The Call to Action on Emergency Alerting launched in 2021 with the goal to reach 100% by 2025. This was adopted a year later as an Outcome of the UN Early Warnings for All initiative.
In challenging times with increasing severity and frequency of disasters, CAP helps countries to save lives and livelihoods, using a simple all-hazards format for emergency alerts that can leverage all available media. CAP serves as a model of worldwide collaboration, and everyone is invited to join in further advancing emergency alerting over the next 20 years.
Get involved in this incredible work by reaching out to OASIS at https://www.oasis-open.org/join-a-tc/or email [email protected] or contact Elysa Jones at [email protected] for more information.
We look forward to celebrating this monumental birthday event at the CAP Implementation Workshop in Leuven, Belgium October 23-24, 2024, co-hosted by Traveler Information Services Association (TISA), Alert-Hub.Org CIC, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), OASIS Open, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).