2016 disaster losses $175B, highest since 2012, insurer notes

BERLIN — Last year saw the highest costs from natural disasters since 2012, with a pair of earthquakes in Japan in April accounting for the heaviest losses, a leading insurer said Wednesday.

Losses from natural disasters worldwide totaled $175 billion last year, some $50 billion of which was covered by insurance, Munich Re said in an annual survey.

“After three years of relatively low [natural catastrophe] losses, the figures for 2016 are back in the midrange, where they are expected to be,” said Torsten Jeworrek, a member of the Munich Re board of management. He stressed that “losses in a single year are obviously random and cannot be seen as a trend.”

The earthquakes on Japan’s southern Kyushu island caused $31 billion worth of damage, with $6 billion of the costs covered by insurance.

Floods in China in June and July caused $20 billion in damage, only $300 million of which was insured.

The third-costliest disaster was Hurricane Matthew, which hit the Caribbean and the eastern United States in August. It incurred losses totaling $10.2 billion, of which $3.8 billion was covered by insurance.

In 2015, when the El Nino weather phenomenon reduced hurricane activity in the North Atlantic, global natural-disaster losses totaled $103 billion, $32 billion of that sum insured.

However, the number of people killed dropped to

8,700 last year from 25,400 the previous year.

The company said there was an “exceptional” number of floods, which accounted for 34 percent of overall losses, compared with an average of 21 percent over the past decade.

Those included $6 billion in losses, about half of

them insured, resulting from storms and flooding in Europe — particularly in Germany and the Paris region — in May and June.

Jeworrek said “the high percentage of uninsured losses, especially in emerging markets and developing countries, remains a concern.”

There were 15 named storms during the 2016 North Atlantic hurricane season — significantly more than in the

previous two years and above the long-term average since 1950, according to a news release from Munich Re.

“To mitigate the risks of natural catastrophes, we continue to support strong public-private partnerships that encourage and facilitate greater investment in pre-loss mitigation and improved infrastructure resilience,” said Tony Kuczinski, president and chief executive officer of Munich Re, US.