POZNAN, Poland, Dec 3 (AlertNet) - The humanitarian community is overwhelmed by rising weather-related disasters and tens of billions of dollars are needed each year to reduce the risks from global warming, aid officials at U.N. climate change talks said on Wednesday.

The number of natural disasters had doubled in the past 20 years from around 200 to 400, Kasidis Rochanakorn, director of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Geneva, told journalists. There were 200 floods in 2005 compared with 50 in 1985, and they were damaging larger areas, he said.

"Floods, droughts, storms do not have to end in disaster, they don't have to kill, people don't have to die. They die because they are not prepared," he said. "The problem today is that capacity has been overwhelmed because of the frequency and intensity of natural disasters."

He called on governments negotiating a successor pact to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming to provide more support for the humanitarian community to improve its ability to prepare and respond.

Maarten van Aalst of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre said it was not clear what proportion of the increase in weather-related disasters was due to global warming, but "we do know that climate change is already playing a role".

The U.N. climate change panel has predicted that rising global temperatures will bring more heatwaves, droughts, heavy rains and stronger storms.

Reid Basher, policy coordinator for the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), warned that harmful development practices - such as stripping forests, destroying wetlands and poor construction - are making disasters more likely just as the impact of climate change begins to bite.

"We are making things worse for ourselves and really putting almost like a time bomb there, waiting for climate change to reveal the hazards and the risks that we have been developing over many years," he said.

Basher said a large proportion of the estimated $50 billion needed each year to cover the cost of adapting to climate change would be required to cut the risk of disasters.

The humanitarian community knows how to help people prepare for increasing disasters - including giving them better climate information and strengthening early warning systems - but there is a lack of capacity to put this into practice on a large enough scale, he added.

José Riera, policy adviser for the U.N. refugee agency, said aid agencies and governments should sit down and work out how to deal with the increasing number of people who will be forced to flee their homes by climate change.

"Climate has always been one of the reasons forcing people to move ... but what we risk seeing in the coming months and years is climate suddenly becoming the main driver of population movements," he said.

Riera said climate change could increase the number of displaced people by around 6 million per year. Statistics from the refugee agency show that 67 million people were uprooted around the world at the end of 2007, 25 million of them because of natural disasters.

The aid officials called on the international community not to treat climate change only as an environmental issue but to focus on the needs of vulnerable people.

"They know that disasters are coming with more intensity, more severity, they want to be supported, and governments around the world ... have to consider seriously the humanitarian aspects, because in the final analysis people matter," said Bekele Geleta, secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

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