Participants in the three-day meeting, to open on 10 January, will hammer out an action plan for assessing risks, collecting and sharing data, and managing emergency situations, the UN agency said.

It follows a record-breaking Atlantic Caribbean hurricane season and the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 which killed more than 200,000 people.

Following the Asian disaster, a 24-hour, 7 day a week staffing of the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Centre has now been confirmed.

A warning centre in Hawaii's Ewa Beach - an area that has also experienced tsunamis - will also be operating around the clock.

With these measures in place, concern about tsunami's hitting the Caribbean will now be debated in Bridgetown.

Landslides

UNESCO said around ten major tsunamis have been recorded in the northern Caribbean, the most recent, in 1946, was triggered by an earthquake in the Dominican Republic that claimed 1,800 lives.

Recent studies point to risks linked to shifts in the North America and Caribbean tectonic plates and to major undersea landslides off the northern shore of Puerto Rico.

The Barbados meeting is the first of the Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Tsunami and Other Coastal Hazards Warning System for the Caribbean and Adjacent Regions