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The United Nations has named Indonesia the country most at risk from tsunamis, with more than five million people here vulnerable to monster waves.

Victor Rembeth, project manager of the UN Joint Strategic Program for Disaster Risk Reduction in Indonesia, said on Wednesday that the evaluation measured the number of areas and residents exposed to active tectonic faults. It was based on data from the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

“In terms of physical vulnerability, Indonesia fares much better than Japan,” Victor said. He added, however, that the country’s level of risk was far higher because of the lack of mitigation and contingency measures.

He said the areas most prone to tsunamis were those nearest the edges of the three tectonic plates that the archipelago straddles — the Indo-Australian, Pacific and Eurasian plates — where undersea earthquakes could trigger massive waves.

“These areas include the western coast of Sumatra, the southern coasts of Java and Nusa Tenggara, the northern coast of Papua and the Maluku Islands,” he said.

“In addition, the tsunami early-warning system established by Indonesia is still relatively inadequate, so that in the event of a disaster, losses will be high.”

He acknowledged, however, that there had been an improvement in government efforts to educate coastal communities about the risk of tsunamis since the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated Aceh. These efforts include the publication of maps of disaster-prone areas.

“Although the maps haven’t been distributed evenly to all disaster-prone areas in the country, the move is still laudable,” Victor said.

Suhardjono, head of the tsunami and earthquake division at the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), said it was “reasonable” that Indonesia would be the country with the highest risk of tsunamis, given its unique position straddling major tectonic faults.

“First, it’s because Indonesia lies along well-defined fault lines,” he said.

“Second, although the frequency of earthquakes in Indonesia is not as high as in Japan, the earthquakes that do occur here tend to be of greater magnitude than those in Japan.”

He added that no matter how frequently a given area was hit by quakes, they would not result in tsunamis if they were below a certain threshold magnitude.

“Another difference with Japan is that it has a smaller land area, perhaps only the size of Sumatra,” Suhardjono said. This, he added, affected the exposure of the population to tsunamis.

He also said that Japan had a much more developed early-warning system than Indonesia.

“Their disaster mitigation human resources are also different, so the handling is different, hence Japan is more able to deal with a disaster,” he said.

Another factor weighing against the Indonesian authorities’ preparedness for tsunamis is the lack of technology to compile seismic records from several thousand years ago.

Indonesia’s earthquake and tsunami data go back only a few hundred years, Suhardjono said.

With data going back earlier, he said, scientists would be able to better model tsunami effects to help mitigate future disasters.