An international humanitarian think-tank presided by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is closing down after it plunged deep into debt, Swiss authorities said on Wednesday.

The Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, which was partly financed by the Swiss government, was launched in 2007 in Geneva under Swiss impetus to bring together the humanitarian community, governments and private companies.

The Swiss Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the non-profit foundation was "over-indebted and must halt its activities."

The Swiss government agreed to pay 1.75 million Swiss francs (1.2 million euros, 1.6 million dollars) to foot half of the debt and the cost of redundancy for about a dozen staff.

Swiss newspaper Le Temps reported recently that some donors had failed to come up with promised funding, while the forum's work also racked up costs.

Apart from Annan, the forum's board was composed of former aid agency chiefs, diplomats, campaigners and top financial thinkers, such as former IMF and World Bank chiefs Michel Camdessus and James Wolfensohn, Nobel prize winners Amartya Sen and Muhammad Yunus, and a Swiss banker, Ivan Pictet.

The day-to-day running was in the hands of humanitarian specialists, most recently headed by a former Swiss development aid chief, Walter Fust.

The Forum notably came up with a landmark report on the humanitarian impact of climate change, which estimated that some 300,000 people a year die as a result of the impact of global warming.

It also helped broker a deal last year involving Ericsson and other telecoms companies to bring crucial weather data to impoverished African communities.