Through taking over the role of Technical Coordinator in a world-spanning consortium with 20 partners including industrial enterprises, research institutions, universities, national disaster prevention institutions and warning service providers, the GFZ reacted to the call of the European Commission to develop a new generation of early warning systems for geological hazards, the Distant Early Warning System DEWS. Making use of funds from the 6th Framework Programme, a series of prototypes of a new generation tsunami warning system was developed, based on the experiences of the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System GITEWS/INATEWS. The development was focused on sensor integration, system interoperability, application of open standards in the development of the architecture and software, and multilingual-multicultural approaches for communication and dissemination of warning products, thus paving the way for world-wide warning in geological disaster prevention.