Asian governments are struggling to end a cycle of pollution that has put millions of live at risk every year.

This summer, the warnings are dire that annual dust storms, smoke haze and industrial air pollution are likely to worsen as countries grapple with territorial non-interference pacts to stop their neighbours from killing their people.

Singaporeans are already duting off the “haze routine” in preparation for Indonesia’s annual forest fires again smother the island in noxious yellow smoke. Last year the pollution index in Singapore rocketed to levels so unhealthy the government advised children, the elderly and people with respiratory problems to stay indoors, media reports said.

Every May to October, southwest monsoon winds blow sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter-laced smoke from Indonesia over down-wind neighbours Singapore and Malaysia.

It’s a cross-border pollution bombardment that Southeast Asians have learnt to endure, as have millions of others in Asia where governments are struggling to stop their neighbours’ annual dust storms, smoke haze and industrial air pollution.

From March through May, Koreans periodically don cotton face masks, swap contact lenses for glasses and seal up their windows as spring sandstorms from the Gobi Desert sweep through Beijing to redden the air across North and South Korea to Japan.

From November through March, north Asia masks up during the annual air pollution surge that comes as China fires up coal-burning power plants to supply winter heating.

After years of suffering, powerless “victim” states have turned pollution forecasting into a fine art, setting up sophisticated systems to predict transnational pollution invasions.

South Korea’s Meteorological Administration texts “yellow dust” warnings to the public on their cell phones.

Hong Kong group Clear the Air, which says China contributes 50 percent of the territory’s air pollution, publishes daily charts showing pollution not only in Hong Kong, but neighbouring Guangdong province in southern China.

About 2,500 km (1,600 miles) south, Singapore television runs an air pollution ticker during haze months, and its scientists track looming clouds of smoke from Borneo and Sumatra with satellites.

“Last year Kalimantan haze came here on the wind, surprisingly, this year Thailand haze also came down. This kind of business has no political boundaries,” said Leong Keong Kwoh, head of Singapore’s satellite monitoring and imaging centre.

Unlike annual weather patterns such as typhoons and monsoons, pollution calendar events are preventable.

But regional efforts to stop countries from polluting their neighbours have been hindered by storms of accusations and counter-accusations over responsibility.

South Korea blames the failure to stop desertification in Mongolia’s Gobi and China’s northern Taklaman deserts for the ever-worsening sandstorms it dubs “yellow dust terrorism”.

Beijing, hit by 17 spring sandstorms in 2006, has pledged a sandstorm-free Olympics. But it blames Hong Kong for some of the air pollution in Guangdong because Hong Kong companies own polluting factories in the province.

Further south, Indonesia says Malaysian and Singaporean firms own several of the oil palm and timber plantations whose land-clearing fires blanket them in smoke.

With Indonesia refusing to sign the main regional response to the problem -- the 2002 ASEAN Haze Pact -- frustrated neighbours have no way to force it to clean up its act.

“The position in law is quite clear -- the territorial sovereign has jurisdiction,” said environmental law specialist Alan Tan, from the National University of Singapore.

“ASEAN was never designed to poke its nose into the internal affairs of individual members. You know you can’t adopt something stronger because you know nobody would buy into it. So you settle for something weak, which obviously, because of its weakness, isn’t working,” he explained.

China’s strongest sandstorms have already swept across the Pacific Ocean to irritate North America and Canada. But it is the Indonesian haze that is set to become Asia’s first truly global environmental headache, said ecologist Faizal Parish of Malaysia’s Global Environment Centre (GEC).

The massive carbon emissions from peatland forest fires made Indonesia the world’s third largest emitter of emissions linked with climate change, Parish said.

Under the world’s only climate change agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, developing countries such as Indonesia are excluded from the first 2008-2012 round of emissions cuts.

“The delay until 2012 sends the signal let’s be as bad as possible until 2012 -- let’s drain and deforest,” Parish said.

It may be one pollution calendar date that comes too late.

“If we don’t act in the next three to five years, the situation will have got so serious that we’ll be faced with serious fires for the next 50 to 100 years,” said Parish.

“There’s 50 billion tonnes of carbon that will be released. It will get to a point of no return”.

Asia’s population is also most at risk from rising sea levels and more powerful storms, but few countries in the region have made detailed plans to deal with the hazards their coastlines and ports would face.

Scientists have predicted a dire future of human-induced global warming causing rising sea-levels that could drown low-lying areas and hit Asia hard, though experts agreed in a UN report on Friday fighting climate change was affordable.

“In most of Asia, if you put that on a list of priorities it falls off the bottom of the page,” said Steve Williams, head of Energy Solutions, which does consultancy work on industry services such as ports and infrastructure.

One in 10 people, mainly in Asia, live in coastal areas most at risk, an international study published last month found. The researchers said many countries cannot afford Dutch-style dykes but urged governments to make billion-dollar policy shifts in long-term planning to encourage more settlements inland.

Limiting global warming to a 2 degrees centigrade rise would cost just 0.12 percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with the technology available, a UN climate change report said after days of wrangling at talks in Bangkok.

The Thai capital could be under water in 20 years because of rising seas from global warming and subsidence, a top Thai climate expert, who warned of a tsunami years before the 2004 disaster, told Reuters in an interview this week.

Smith Dharmasaroja, head of Thailand’s National Disaster Warning Centre, said the city of 10 million people was sinking at an alarming rate and to avert disaster it needed to construct a massive sea wall. He said the government did not pay attention.

Wealthy Singapore -known for organisation and efficiency -is the most likely country to push ahead with sea defences to avoid being partly submerged under six metres (20 feet) of water in a worst case scenario.

Neighbouring Indonesia, which banned sand exports for land reclamation to Singapore this year, has said it could lose 2,000 islands by 2030. It has been drafting a national strategy to deal with climate change.

Ranked by population, China is most at risk to rising sea levels with 143 million people living by the coast, followed by India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan.

Regional powerhouse China is expected to be vulnerable along its storm-prone southeastern coastline, though government environmental protection efforts have been more committed to tackling rampant air and water pollution.

In India, where ports are being expanded to boost fuel shipments from its booming oil refining sector to a region hungry for more fuel, environmentalists say coastal development has reduced natural sea defences such as sand bars and mangroves.

“We need to understand these things, their implication and certainly a strategy needs to be worked out -but it’s not that we have a plan tomorrow,” said PS Goel, Secretary at the Ministry of Earth Sciences.

“Something needs to be done for the ports ... certainly we all are worried.”