By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Severe floods which have taken a heavy toll in South Asia and Europe this year illustrate the need to spend more on reducing the risks communities face from natural disasters, a United Nations agency said on Friday.

Sturdy houses must be built away from low-lying areas, and early warning systems should be set up to save lives in line with an agreement backed by 168 countries in 2005 in Kobe, Japan, the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction said.

"It is not rocket science. It is plain and simple stuff about building stronger houses, putting in warning systems and educating the public so we're not flat-footed when these events come," ISDR expert Reid Basher told reporters in Geneva.

Monsoon flood waters have killed hundreds in Asia, affecting some 30 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Heavy rains have also inundated parts of Europe, including Switzerland where the United Nations has its European base.

"We can't say it is due to climate change but we are sure it is the type of thing we will expect to see more of in the future," Basher said.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. grouping of hundreds of experts, has noted an increasing trend in extreme weather events over the past 50 years. In reports released this year, the IPCC said storms, droughts and floods would likely intensify as a result of global warming stoked by human activities such as burning heat-trapping fossil fuels.

FLOODING

Many millions more people are likely to be flooded every year by the 2080s "as a result of climate change", according to the Geneva-based ISDR.

"The number affected will be largest in the mega-deltas of Asia and Africa and the small island states, struck by the double threat of sea level rise and river flooding," it said.

Floods accounted for 84 percent of all deaths in disasters from 2000 to 2005, as well as 65 percent of the $466 billion in losses caused by disasters from 1992 to 2001, it said. Britain's flooding this year was estimated to have cost about $12 billion alone, it said.

The so-called Hyogo Framework is a blueprint that was hammered out in Kobe following the devastating tsunami which killed 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean in December 2004.

Basher praised China for taking steps to improve housing and otherwise protect poor, vulnerable communities from disasters.

While some two million people were killed by flooding in China in 1959, "now every year they have the same sorts of floods, possibly even worse, but the numbers killed are only on the order of say 500 people a year," he said.

"There are modest investments in early warning systems, evacuation systems, public education and better building standards. These pay off -- and clearly in the China case, pay off very handsomely."

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