Steve Sawyer, Climate Director of Greenpeace International in Amsterdam, said a warning system like that already operating in the Pacific would give threatened areas time to react in an emergency.

It would provide "a substantial number of minutes and lessen the loss of life if not the loss of property."

Ecologists say the international community must also help the devastated Asian countries to find a new approach to management of threatened regions, emphasising human safety instead of tourist infrastructure.

A timely moment to press for new international measures will be a world conference next month in Kobe, Japan, on disaster reduction. Environmentalists plan to make their points there forcibly.

Farah Sofa is a campaigner with the Indonesian section of the environmental group Friends of the Earth. The epicentre of last Sunday's quake triggering tidal waves was just off the coast of her country.

"Governments should set up long-term plans to reduce any foreseeable disaster and special plans for the coastal areas, taking into account the vulnerability of the poor communities and ensuring that we have early warning systems, immediate emergency responses and all necessary information," she said.

Sofa, of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment, warned that better infrastructure and contingency plans were required for densely populated coastal areas of Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka.

"The most threatened areas are on the coast, these are also the poorest areas with the poorest infrastructures and the most difficult access."

Governments should focus on "human security instead of building infrastructure for attracting tourism," she urged, speaking by telephone from Jakarta.

"Roads, access, electricity, public utilities, water sanitation, should be the order of the day.

"We should have cooperation between governments, it is a shared responsibility of all governments, including industrial countries. We need assistance from more advanced countries."

Tsunami, or earthquake-driven tidal waves, were natural disasters that would happen again.

"We can expect in the coming years similar events happening as a result of global warming and therefore help and prevention are the responsability of the Northern countries as well," she said.

Environmental campaigners Greenpeace International send the same message.

Said Philippines-based Athena Ronquillo, political adviser to Greenpeace regional office for Asia in Bangkok:

"For countries like India and Sri Lanka and Sumatra, the scale of poverty is just too big and it is an interplay between environment and development.

"People in coastal areas depend upon fishing and marine life, they don't have a choice."

Ronquillo said the world conference on disaster reduction at Kobe during January 18-22 was a timely occasion.

Non-governmental organisations would be putting on its agenda proposals not just for more money but for "proactively incorporating disaster management programmes in development planning."

Their proposals would be to "rehabilitate these communities, help the people retrieve their livelihood, rebuild these communities in a much more acceptable, environment-friendly way," she said from Manila.

The Thai resort island of Phuket "was really unsafe, a makeshift infrastructure, 90 percent of people who were there are not locals, they're tourists or foreigners."

NGOs wanted to "limit the population in the coastal areas and build infrastructures that do not over-exploit local resources such as fresh water."

"Currently their makeshift housing is very close to the shores and cannot resist even normal typhoons or ordinary storms," said Ronquillo.

Speaking from Amsterdam, Greenpeace official Sawyer said: "There should be building codes for the coastal areas, in some of these areas there has been a concentration of poorly built constructions, hotels, tourist shacks, shacks for the locals."

Yves Contassot of France's Green party said on French radio: "Hundreds of millions of euros are going to be invested in reconstructing mass tourism.

"We might well ask how much is going to be put aside purely for preventive measures, early warning systems and systems of informing the public."

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