GENEVA, Jan 9 (AFP) - The international community must help Pakistan recover from last year's devastating floods and boost climate resilience, or the country will be locked in misery, the head of the UN development agency told AFP.

Pakistan is still reeling from the unprecedented monsoon floods unleashed last August which killed more than 1,700 people and affected some 33 million others.

To meet the acute needs, the country and the United Nations will on Monday (Jan 9) co-host an international conference in Geneva seeking billions of dollars in donor pledges and other support towards a long-term recovery and resilience plan.

"The sheer destruction of these floods, the human suffering, the economic cost ... turns these floods truly into a cataclysmic event," said United Nations Development Programme administrator Achim Steiner, whose agency is helping organise the conference.

In an interview ahead of the event, he said the situation remained dire months after the monsoon rains ended.