5. EARLY WARNING AND EARLY RESPONSE a) Definition of Terms  Disaster is a sudden, overwhelming and unforeseen event. Disasters are classified into natural and man-made or human.  Conflict is a man-made or human disaster that ensues from rising tensions among two or more different parties. Conflict prevention requires careful monitoring of indicators of rising tensions and taking measures to ease them.  Early Warning consists of systematic data collection, risk analysis, and the transmission of information with recommendations to targeted recipients.  Early Response systems refer to timely and appropriate prevention initiatives, usually undertaken during early stages of perceived disasters, in this case, potential violent conflict.  Early Warning and Early Response System – is a fully integrated cycle of timely and appropriate interventions to prevent occurrence of disasters through continuous learning and improvements on analysis of collected data. b) Early Warning Tools and Systems Early warning was primarily envisaged as a tool meant to save life. It sought to prepare response effort to prevent significant impact of war. Early warning evolved from being an activity to an integrated process of continuous monitoring of set of activities through application of quantitative and qualitative tools and methods. Quantitative Early Warning Tools provide strong predictive capabilities, looking at the magnitude and extent of potential disaster. Quantitative tools provide the numbers which can be mapped into predefined indices for 14