Britain has urged the international community to set up a global early warning system for natural disasters, said a local report Wednesday.
"Because the public are so sensitized to the issue of natural hazards, this is the moment to put in not just an Indian Ocean tsunami early warning system, but something that is global," Professor David King, the British government's chief scientific adviser, was quoted by The Times newspaper as saying.
"We have to set up an early warning system which has no boundaries, covering all physical and natural hazards: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and near-Earth objects," he added.
King also urged London to use its presidency this year of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations to implement the plan.
A tsunami, caused by a strong earthquake on Dec. 26 last year, killed more than 273,000 people on the Indian Ocean rim.
In early March, experts clinched an agreement in Paris on a technical plan and timetable for setting up a tsunami warning network in the Indian Ocean, under which the nations will receive seismic data in April from earthquake monitoring stations in Tokyo and Hawaii.