The death toll of around 100,000 has only been matched twice in the last 25 years, the world's second-biggest reinsurer said in its annual review of the year.

The cost to reinsurers was expected to exceed 75 billion dollarsbillion euros) in 2005, compared with more than 40 billion dollars in 2004, Munich Re said.

Hurricane Katrina, which pummelled the southern United States in August and caused widespread flooding in New Orleans, accounted for around 45 billion dollars alone, Munich Re said.

Overall economic losses as a result of natural catastrophes reached more than 200 billion dollars -- including 125 billion dollars of damage caused by Katrina -- compared with 145 billion dollars in 2004.

Munich Re also pointed to the heavy human and financial cost of the earthquake in Pakistan in October in which 73,000 people were killed and 3.5 million made homeless in the country's worst natural disaster.

The other years in which the death toll exceeded 100,000 in the last quarter of a century were in 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami claimed 200,000 lives and in 1991, when 160,000 people died, many of them in a cyclone and tidal wave in Bangladesh.

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