The UN education and scientific agency said the cost of the Indian Ocean mechanism would be a mere 30 million dollars (22.5 million euros), a far cry from the billions in damage caused by last month's Asian tsunami disaster.

UNESCO, which helped set up an existing tsunami early warning system for the Pacific in 1968, is taking the lead in international efforts to create a regional alert system for the Indian Ocean followed by a global one to avert another tragedy on the scale of the tsunami that killed more than 159,000.

"If everything goes well, the initial warning system for the Indian Ocean should be put in place at least in its provisional form by June 2006 and the global warning system should be put in place... by June 2007," said UNESCO chief Koichiro Matsuura.

Matsuura said the estimated cost of the Indian Ocean tsunami early warning system would be a paltry 30 million dollars and lamented that governments and donors had up until the December 26 disaster turned a deaf ear to proposals to set up such a center.

"It's peanuts compared to what happened," he told a news conference here on the sidelines of a UN conference on small islands. "We learned this in a very costly way."

The conference opened Monday with a call to set up the global system to help the world's most vulnerable states cope with hazards and disasters like the tsunami that devastated 12 countries including the Maldives, a cluster of 1,192 low-lying islands scattered across the Indian Ocean.

The Maldives representative at the conference said damage from the tsunami on the islands was estimated at more than one billion dollars and that 150,000 people had been left homeless in the wake of the disaster.

Delegates at the conference pressed for tough action on climate change, with the tiny Pacific state of Tuvalu, population 11,500, accusing the United States of being "in denial" about its effects.

Tuvalu, a low-lying atoll affected by sea-level rise, said it had locked horns with the United States and other countries over calls for action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, the cause of man-made global warming.

"Clearly we have difficulties with some countries willing to admit that climate change is happening now," said Ian Fry, Tuvalu's international environmental adviser.

"Principally the United States is in a state of denial," he told AFP on the sidelines of closed-door meetings.

The United States has refused to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol which is aimed at fighting global warming and is due to come into force on February 16.

John Turner, the US assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, said the United States understood the concerns of island nations but would stick with its position.

"We realise the vulnerability of low-level island states to the potential impact of climate change and of course they are seriously vulnerable to extreme weather events," he told AFP.

But Turner said Washington would stick to the commitments made at a UN conference on climate change in Buenos Aires last month, and that the Mauritius meeting was not the forum to "renegotiate" issues of global warming.

Representatives from more than 110 countries including some 40 island nations are meeting in Mauritius this week to review an action plan launched in 1994 in Barbados to help the world's smallest countries deal with challenges such as climate change, trade losses and natural disasters.

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