"We meet here in Mauritius at a time of terrible death and destruction caused by the Asian tsunami two weeks ago," said UN official Anwarul Chowdhury as he opened a week-long UN conference on small islands.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is due to attend the conference later this week after touring the Maldives, a cluster of 1,192 low-lying islands scattered across the Indian Ocean that was hard hit by the December 26 tidal waves.

"His recent call for a global early warning system needs serious attention from this conference," said Chowdhury, the secretary general of the meeting.

An early warning system, which makes use of seismic stations throughout the world to locate earthquakes capable of unleashing giant waves, is already in place for Pacific Ocean countries.

Providing such technology and expertise for Indian Ocean countries has been singled out as one of the urgent measures to be taken in the aftermath of the tsunami, which the United Nations has said is the worst natural disaster in its history.

"Many lives could have been saved had there been an appropriate early warning mechanism in the Indian Ocean," Paul Berenger, the prime minister of Mauritius, told the opening of the conference.

Berenger appealed to the leaders of small islands and their donor partners attending the conference to "seriously reflect on concrete recommendations regarding the setting up of early warning systems and methods of operating them."

World leaders at a summit in Jakarta last week called for setting up the early warning system and Thailand said it was ready to host the headquarters for the facility.

The new mechanism is likely to dominate talks next week at the UN World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan.

The tsunami unleashed by an earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra has underscored the need to help islands cope with more powerful and frequent hurricanes, cyclones and storms that many experts see as the effects of climate change.