Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warned that fighting greenhouse gasses entailed more than adopting new technologies, with individuals required to change their lifestyles.

"Asia being the rapidly growing continent with the largest share of the human population located over here, clearly vulnerabilities in Asia are going to be of importance," Pachauri told an environmental conference in Tokyo.

The Indian scientist said Asia risked floods and diminished access to fresh water and food supply if global warming continued unabated.

"Poor communities are of course at the highest risk," he said, explaining that they did not have the capacity to adapt to climate change.

"In the case of coastal areas, flooding of the residences of millions of people could take place in South, Southeast and East Asia."

He warned that the vital agricultural production of Asia's densely populated delta regions would be in jeopardy if temperatures kept rising.

Pachauri's panel, a network of 3,000 experts regarded as the world's top scientific authority on global warming, shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president turned environmental activist Al Gore.

Pachauri applauded the Nobel committee, which announced the award a week ago, for linking climate change to peace and stability in the world.

"I thought the Nobel Peace Prize committee has taken some of these factors into account," he said.

"We already have several areas of the world where there is intense competition for water resources. If these become more scarce, then the danger of conflict obviously will increase, substantially."

The brutal conflict in Darfur has sometimes been referred to as the world's first war triggered by climate change. UN statistics show that rainfall has diminished 40 percent in the Sudanese region over the past two decades, causing drought and intense friction over access to the land.

At the two-day conference sponsored by Global Environmental Action, a group created by Japanese politicians, business leaders and scholars, Pachauri applauded Japan for taking an initiative in battling climate change.

"One of the major findings we have is the importance of lifestyle changes," he said. "This problem cannot be treated as one which requires (a) technological fix only.

"(There) has to be a change in human behaviour. And I think in this regard I must say Japan is setting an outstanding example," he said.

He applauded Japan's "Cool Biz" campaign, in which politicians and bureaucrats are encouraged to shun their usual jackets and ties in the summer to cut down on air-conditioning.

"The time has come for us to drastically shift our lifestyle in a way that is more friendly to the earth to become a sustainable society," Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told the conference.

Japan was host of the 1997 negotiations that drafted the Kyoto Protocol, which mandates cuts in greenhouse gases by developed countries, and the country has sought a leading role in drafting the successor to the landmark treaty.

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