Natural disasters have killed nearly five times more people in 2003 than they did last year, according to the world's top reinsurer.
German-based Munich Re said in an annual report on natural disasters that 50,000 people had been killed around the world this year by earthquakes as well as floods, storms and other extreme weather that could be a result of climate change.
It is only the fourth time such a high death toll has been recorded since 1980 and Munich Re warned that the recent spate of extreme weather was set to continue.
"Unusual events such as heatwaves in the past year are yet another sign of climate change," Munich Re, the world's biggest insurer to insurers said.
"They show that we should expect a new kind of risk from weather and potentially more damages," it said.
Increasing the death toll, the earthquake in Iran on Friday and the earlier heatwave in central Europe had both killed more than 20,000 people, it said.
Munich Re said the Iranian city's dense population and weak buildings meant many people had been killed. It warned that a similar combination of risk factors existed elsewhere in developing countries.
The reinsurance giant said that Europe's record temperatures from June to August caused economic losses of some €10.5 billion and it warned that the sweltering weather may be the "summer of the future."
"By the middle of the century it could turn out to be more or less normal," Munich Re's head of Geo-risk research, Mr Gerhard Berz, said.
Insurers paid out €10 billion more this year compared to 2002.