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 yesterday. 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 . 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 costs, 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. Last year's losses were "in the mid-range" after three years of relatively low costs, Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek said in a statement. He stressed that "losses in a single year are obviously random and cannot be seen as a trend."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 that "the high percentage of uninsured losses, especially in emerging markets and developing countries, remains a concern."