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Four-fifths of marine pollution starts on land, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said Tuesday ahead of a meeting of environment ministers in Montreal, Canada, next week.

In a report, "Protecting the Oceans from Land-Based Activities," UNEP singled out sewage as a "priority pollutant" for urgent action. Two and a half million people a year get infectious hepatitis from eating sewage-contaminated raw shellfish, and about 25,000 of them die, it said.

Other priorities for action were excessive use of nutrients, the physical alteration or destruction of habitats, and changes in sediment flows, it said.

"The oceans cover 71 percent of our planet's surface, regulate its climate, and provide its ultimate waste disposal system, and yet our species continues to treat them as our common sewer," UNEP director Klaus Toepfer said.

The report, based on studies by leading marine scientists, was prepared for a week-long meeting due to open in Montreal on Monday.

Senior officials from more than 100 countries are expected to take part. Environment ministers are expected to take part on November 29 and 30.

"The economic costs of failing to take action to control land-based activities are enormous," the report said.

Teopfer said the value of marine and coastal ecosystems had been estimated at 13 trillion dollars, equivalent to half of annual global gross national product. "Yet we continue to treat coasts and oceans as if they were not an important economic resource for developing and developed countries alike," he said in a statement.

"Almost 80 percent of the environmental problems of the oceans start on land," Toepfer went on.

"It is here that most of the pollution originates, whether from factories and sewage works at the coast, from fertilisers or pesticides washed into rivers and down to the sea, or from chemicals emitted from car exhausts and industry and carried by the winds far out to the oceans."

The meeting in Montreal will review an action plan on sewage.

The results of the meeting will feed into an international conference on freshwater, to be held in Bonn from December 3 to 7, and into the UN's world summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg in September next year.

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