Australia urgently needs an independent national advisory panel of expert geoscientists to provide an ''early warning system'' on environmental crises before they become irreversible, according to the Geological Society of Australia.

Society president and Curtin University geology professor Peter Cawood said that while Australia had been instrumental in the development of an early warning system for tsunami risk along the Australian coastline, it had not given the same attention to early warning systems for other environmental crises.

''As a result, we are now seeing, as just one example, very serious environmental problems such as falling water levels in the Murray River and the immediate risks to the Lower Murray Lakes being posed by acid sulphate soils,'' Professor Cawood said. ''Our governments need to take the early warning concept a step further and establish a national geoscience expert panel to provide an early warning system for a range of future environmental crises which, if not tackled early on, have real potential to reap irreversible environmental and economic damage in this country.''

He said some of the key environmental problems plaguing Australia including salinity, drought, water contamination, water shortages, climate change, loss of productive land and the impact of urban development on land health had been on the radar of geoscientists for many years, long before they became ''hot'' political topics.

''But there has been no real mechanism for the geoscientific community as a whole to collectively feed this early warning research back to governments, or for this research to be treated seriously by governments, at such an early stage in the development of the problems,'' he said.

The Geological Society has proposed a national geoscience expert panel to provide an independent voice and scientifically based warnings and recommendations on a wide range of environmental problems. By informing government before such problems become full-blown environmental crises, there would be more time to respond and implement policy solutions.

Professor Cawood noted that while it was easy for governments to ignore the research of a couple of geoscientists, it was much harder for them to ignore the collective recommendations of a high-level, independent expert panel.