The CAP data structure is backward-compatible with existing alert formats including the Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) used in NOAA Weather Radio and the broadcast Emergency Alert System as well as new technology such as the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), while adding capabilities such as the following: The US National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) November 2000 report on "Effective Disaster Warnings" recommended that "standard method should be developed to collect and relay instantaneously and automatically all types of hazard warnings and reports locally, regionally and nationally for input into a wide variety of dissemination systems.
[2] A series of field trials and long-term demonstration projects during 2002-03 led to the submission of a draft CAP specification to the OASIS standards process for formalization.
[3][4] At a meeting in Geneva in October 2006 the CAP 1.1 specification was taken under consideration by the International Telecommunication Union's Standardization Sector for adoption as an ITU-T recommendation.
[9] The Australian Government Standard for Common Alerting Protocol (CAP-AU-STD, 2012) was developed by a CAP-AU-STD stakeholder group comprising federal agencies Emergency Management Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology, GeoScience Australia, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the Department of Health as well as a number of State Government authorities and emergency services agencies.
[10][11] In Canada, a working group composed of public alerting practitioners and government agencies has developed a CAP Canadian Profile (CAP-CP) based on CAP but specialized to address the needs of Canadian public alerting stakeholders, such as bilingualism, geocoding for Canada, managed lists of locations and events, etc.
[citation needed] CAP has been implemented for a small-scale, grassroots hazard information system in Sri Lanka following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.
[13][14][15] The Federal Office for Citizen Protection and Disaster Support (Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe, BBK) is working on an implementation based on CAP 1.2, which will allow for Internet-based access to data provided by the nation's modular warning system MoWaS.
In case no broadcast receiver, like a radio or television, is running nearby, the resulting warning effect of SatWaS would be severely limited, because many state-run emergency sirens have been left unmaintained or were dismantled altogether.