"We have gone from the point of defending ourselves from flooding to managing floods and learning to live with them," said Eelco van Beek, who was among the 300 experts attending a conference in the Dutch city of Nijmegen.

During the past two years, more than 600 floods have been recorded in the world, causing the deaths of 19,000 people and damage valued at about 25 billion dollars (20 billion euros).

The figures do not include the deaths of some 273,000 people when a tsunami hit the countries bordering the Indian Ocean last December.

The conference in the Netherlands brought together scientists and humanitarian specialists to try to find ways of handling inundations, whether from the sea or rivers.

"It is time to say good-bye to the traditional approach of making ever higher dikes and ever stronger pumps," said Melanie Schultz van Haegen, the Dutch state secretary for water management.

A purely defensive strategy is "untenable, especially because of the difficulty of defending against the consequences of climate change," she said.

Pioneers in the fight to control water, the Netherlands now prefers to allow rivers to overflow into specific spill-over zones.

As for crises such as the Asian tsunami, the conference called for a global alert and prevention system, including the means to reach people who do not have access to mass communication such as the Internet or telephones.

In Africa, for example, transistors have been handed out to residents in certain areas at risk of flooding so they can get the alerts. The operation is set to be extended to southeast Asia.

"These systems can give an alert for all types of disasters because a tsunami does not hit just once in their lives," said Avinash Tigay, the Indian director for water management issues at the World Meteorological Organization.

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