BANGKOK (AFP) - Governments worldwide must prepare for climatic events like El Nino in order to limit potentially huge damages to their economies, a key meeting of experts in Bangkok urged Thursday. "Governments across the world ... (must) formally acknowledge the value of long lead forecasts in alleviating social and economic costs related to climate variations," a conference statement said. It also said Asia needed a forum of climate experts to help avoid disasters resulting from events like the El Nino weather phenomenon currently battering the region.
The Asian Regional Meeting on El Nino Related Crises, wrapping up three days of talks, recommended the body be set up to advise countries around the region, an official statement said. The Bangkok-based Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC), which hosted the meeting alongside the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will now work to set up the regional forum.
The statement said it was vital that Asian countries coordinate their efforts in tackling the El Nino crisis through sharing information and creating an accurate regional forecasting system. "The conference will be followed up with the establishment of an information clearing house ... at the ADPC headquarters in Bangkok," the statement said. "It will serve to bridge the gap between climate scientists ... (and) administrators, policy-makers and the general public," it added.
El Nino, which occurs every few years, involves a warming of the upper Pacific Ocean, causing severe drought and extreme flooding in East Asia and altering climatic conditions around the globe. Experts had earlier warned that the current El Nino weather phenomenon battering Asia and the world would likely be the biggest climatic event this century and causing in excess of $8 billion damage.
Speakers at the opening of the conference on Tuesday said that El Nino, in combination with the regionwide economic collapse, would slow growth and development over the coming year. Experts said that the main effect on Southeast Asia would be drought, seriously damaging the region's agricultural sector which occupies more than half the economically active population of the region. Although they said that the full affect of the current weather-induced crisis had yet to be realized, it would lead to reduced crop yields and hamper efforts to recover from the current economic turmoil. .
El Nino has been blamed for an array of disasters battering Asia, from severe droughts in Thailand and the Philippines to forest fires in Indonesia which last year cast a pall of smoke over much of the region.