Former Australian foreign Minister Gareth Evans, who heads the group, named Iraq, Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the main areas of concern in the Middle East.
Mr Evans warned that there was grave danger of something going catastrophically wrong in the region, particularly in Iraq and the consequences would be devastating.
The second major area was Africa, with its conflicts in Sudan/Darfur, North Uganda and Congo.
At present, the most destructive area of all was Congo because of the high mortality rate from undernourishment and epidemics exacerbated by conflict. High numbers of people were also being killed each day in actual fighting.
This was in turn caused by the total collapse of the state infrastructure brought about by war. "We assume that in this conflict up to 1,000 people are killed each day," he said.
Third-placed among world crisis centres was north-east Asia, especially the problem of the divided Korean peninsula.
Nuclear weapons
The situation in the region has been aggravated in recent years by North Korea's efforts to build nuclear weapons along with a revival of crude nationalism and growing hostility between China and Japan.
There was danger of a nuclear arms race, warned Mr Evans, and if North Korea was "stupid enough" to carry out a test explosion, it would be very difficult to restrain Japan, with its increasingly nationalistic inclinations, from developing its own atomic weapons.
If that happened, it would be difficult to imagine China continuing to content itself with its relatively limited nuclear arsenal, Mr Evans added.
He said that in the Middle East, if Iran gained possession of nuclear arms, Saudi Arabia and Egypt would want them too, as the two Sunni Muslim countries would not simply stand aside and watch a Shi'ite regional power establishing itself in their part of the world.
Mr Evans said that in coming decades, there would be a "cascade" of proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world.
An element coming up ever more clearly was the revival of nationalism. In the case of Iran, it simply wanted to put itself forward as a regional power.
Japan in turn had a feeling of wounded pride because it was no longer automatically seen in Asia as the leading power, and all the world was instead concentrating on China.
China in turn had many internal problems which communist ideology did not help solve. So Beijing was also using the nationalist lever.
Politicians everywhere were doing so more and more often - but that did not help prevent conflicts, said Mr Evans.