ITU Standards in Disaster Relief: The Role of Satellites

The increasing use of telecommunications and ICTs for emergency communications, international agreements, new national policies, partnerships for cooperation in emergency are important tools already in place for even faster response to disasters.The International Telecommuni-cations Union (ITU) as the UN agency encharged with telecom-munications and information communications techno-logies (ICT) is leading the efforts in harmonizing technologies, services and establishing standards for emergency com-munications. All ITU sectors are involved and are working hard at the complexity of this issue. This article presents a short summary of ITU standards, recom-mendations and studies on the subject of emergency communications.