The IOC-UNESCO international conference to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami held in Jakarta in November 2014 acknowledged the achievements of the last 10 years of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (IOTWMS). The conference recognised that community capacity building for tsunami awareness and preparedness is an ongoing programme at national level and that the focus for the next 10 years should be on the “Last Mile” of the IOTWMS. These recommendations were taken to the 10th Session of the ICG/IOTWMS held in Muscat, Oman in March 2015. One of the key outcomes was that the Intergovernmental Coordinating Group (ICG) decided to place greater focus on community awareness and preparedness to help ensure more appropriate responses to tsunami warning information. In line with these recommendations, the ICG/IOTWMS conducted Exercise Indian Ocean Wave 2016 (IOWave16) on 7-8 September 2016. The exercise simulated Indian Ocean countries being put in a tsunami warning situation that required the National Tsunami Warning Centre (NTWC) and the National and/or Local Disaster Management Offices (NDMO/LDMO) to test their Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and communications links at all levels of the warning and response chain. Twenty-four Indian Ocean Member States participated in the exercise, and for the first time, 12 countries took the exercise down to the community level where over 50,000 people were evacuated. Recognising that the lessons learnt from this exercise could contribute to a better understanding of the gaps as well as enhance preparedness in the Indian Ocean Region, and further in line with the World Tsunami Awareness Day (WTAD), UNESCAP, IOC-UNESCO, Indian Ocean Tsunami Information Centre (IOTIC), ICG/IOTWMS Secretariat, and Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB) agreed to organize a regional workshop for countries involved in Exercise IOWave16 during 5-6 December 2016 in Bandung, Indonesia.

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