The biggest-ever gathering on tackling the world's water crisis was warned that water-related catastrophes are more frequent and more brutal, inflicting a rising toll in lives and damage, and greenhouse gases are fingered as a cause.

"Global warming is intensifying these disasters," said Avinash Tyagi, director of the climate and water department at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

Over the last century, temperatures had risen by 0.74 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) but have accelerated sharply in the last 50 years, he said.

This has coincided with changes in rainfall and snowfall, leading in turn to the now sadly familiar images of parched fields and flooded streets.

Tyagi said scientists were striving to fill gaps in their knowledge, but feared worse is to come when climate change shifts up a gear.

"The projections point to the 21st century as the century of floods or the century of droughts," said Tyagi. "But it could be a century of floods and drought, a mixture of extremes."

"Floods are on the rise. The damage is increasing by five percent per year, while the number of big floods is also increasing," said Chris Zevenbergen, a Dutch expert who is a professor at the UN's Institute for Water Education.

Ministers from Central America and the Caribbean said that they were in the firing line.

"Central America is very vulnerable to the impact of climate change," said Tomas Vaquero, the Honduran minister of natural resources and the environment.

"There is every likelihood of droughts on the Pacific side (of Central America) and floods on the Caribbean side. There are also likely to be changes in the large marine current and salination of our coastal areas" from rising seas.

Experts said strategies for tackling the threat include dams and dikes to collect precious water for parched times; levees to protect cities in river basins; more efficient irrigation; rainwater harvesting; and "climate alert systems" to alert the public of impending weather events.

Authorities should also map vulnerable terrain, develop models of local water drainage, outlaw building in areas at risk and enforce "flood-resilient" building design.

Zevenbergen said only five percent of development in the world's expanding cities was planned. The rest amounted to building in a piecemeal or anarchic fashion.

When the rains come, slum dwellers and homes on flood plains are exposed to inundation and land slips.

Toshio Okazumi, a senior official for water management at Japan's ministry of land, infrastructure, transport and tourism, said his country was already drawing up plans for climate-related water disasters.

From 1901 to 1930, Japan averaged 3.5 days per year in which a day's rainfall was more than 200mm (eight inches), he said. From 1978, though, this rose to 5.1 days per year, a 150 percent increase in frequency.

A century from now, rainfall in Japan will increase by between 10 and 30 percent, especially in the north, increasing the risk of floods, according to Japanese simulations.

Han Seung-soo, prime minister of South Korea, whose country has been hit by two major typhoons and a drought since 2002, took part in a panel that recommended six priorities for reducing the toll of such catastrophes through civil preparedness, emergency water supplies and sanitation.

Loic Fauchon, president of the World Water Council, suggested the creation of a cadre of hydrologists, which he called "water blue helmets" in deference to the UN.

These experts could be rushed to a flood-stricken country to provide valuable skills, he argued.

The World Water Forum, held every three years, has drawn registrations from more than 27,000 policymakers, experts, corporate executives and activists. The seven-day conference winds up in Istanbul on Sunday.

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