"The tsunami will have a low impact on Lloyd's and will be something that we'll take in the normal run of business," Lord Peter Levene told AFP's financial news subsidiary AFX News Friday on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

Although the earthquake and tsunami wreaked havoc across South Asia, the devastation was limited to coastal settlements, where people were simply too poor to afford insurance, he explained.

"You've only got to look at the pictures on television and see the buildings where people lived to conclude that the amount of insurance cover was minimal," said Levene, who was on holiday in Malaysia with his family at the time.

This was in stark contrast to the hurricanes that swept across Florida last year, which likely wiped out most of Lloyd's profits for 2004, he said.

Lloyd's, a confederation of underwriters, made almost two billion pounds (2.9 billion euros, 3.8 billion dollars) in 2003, and would have delivered another set of strong results in 2004 were it not for the series of tropical storms that tore through the Carribean late last Summer.

"2004 profits will not be as large as they would have been having paid out over two billion dollars," said Levene.

"There are always hurricanes in Florida, but there's never, ever been four like that in a four-week period."

Now, Lloyd's insurance market would likely report profits in the "hundreds of millions," of pounds, said Levene.

Echoing a number of public figures at this year's World Economic Forum, Levene said that global warming and mushrooming greenhouse gas emissions were having a discernible effect on the number of natural catastrophes around the globe.

"I'm not a meteorologist but the frequency and severity of natural disasters has increased significantly over the last 20 years, almost beyond recognition," said Levene. "That forces us to have to take a much harder line (on premiums)."

Climate change, he added, was "helpful" to Lloyd's insurers, because it "persuaded underwriters to keep premiums up and not cut them to uneconomical levels".

For 2005, Lloyd's has decided to take on less business in order to improve profit margins for underwriters.

"By cutting capacity we are trying to avoid writing insurance policies that are fundamentally unprofitable."

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