Climate disasters in first half of 2025 costliest ever on record, research shows | Climate crisis

The first half of 2025 was the costliest on record for major disasters in the United States, driven by massive wildfires in Los Angeles and storms that battered much of the rest of the country, according to a climate nonprofit that restarted work halted by Donald Trump’s administration tracking the biggest disasters.

In the first six months of this year, 14 separate weather disasters each causing at least $1 billion in damage struck the United States, the group Climate Central calculated. In total, these events cost $101 billion in damages – losses to homes, businesses, highways and other infrastructure – a higher toll than any other first half since records began in 1980.

Most of that toll is due to the ferocious wildfires that razed parts of Los Angeles in January, a disaster that destroyed about 16,000 buildings and led to the indirect deaths of about 400 people. At $61 billion in damage, the Los Angeles fires are one of the costliest weather disasters on record in the United States, and the only event in the top 10 that is not a hurricane.

The growing cost of fires, storms, hurricanes, droughts and floods – all made worse by the human-caused climate crisis – was cataloged over the previous 45 years by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), until the Trump administration “retired” the data set in May, citing “changing priorities, statutory mandates and personnel changes “.

Information on billion-dollar disasters through the end of 2024 is still available, frozen, on Noaa’s website, but Climate Central sought to expand this work, citing its importance as a barometer of the climate crisis as well as a planning resource for cities and states facing the growing dangers of extreme weather impacts.

Over the past four decades, these disasters have become much more serious. The cost of all disasters between 1985 and 1995 was $299 billion, a figure dwarfed by the damage of the last decade – with $1.4 billion in losses between 2014 and last year.

“This data set is simply too important not to be updated, we were receiving requests for information from the private sector, local communities and academia,” said Adam Smith, who led the billion-dollar disaster project at Noaa, before ending his 20-year tenure at the agency in May, amid Trump’s purge of the federal workforce.

Smith, who has now revived this work at Climate Central, said the latest dataset was compiled using the same methodology as Noaa. “We’re definitely seeing more of these big, expensive events, since 2017, it’s on a whole new level,” he said. “Climate change is increasing the intensity and frequency of these extreme phenomena.

“Climate Central attempts to fill the information void to reclaim some of the lost expertise and tools that society needs to access. We’re in a sort of triage situation where we’re trying to save and carry on as much as possible. We do our best to achieve this.

Climate Central’s first update ends in June, which means it doesn’t report on July’s deadly floods in Texas, which killed more than 130 people, including young girls camping on the banks of a river that overflowed.

Additionally, so far this year, the United States has not been hit by a major, destructive hurricane, meaning 2025 is not currently on track to be one of the costliest on record by the end of the year. The absence of landfalling hurricanes is fortunate, experts say, especially as the Trump administration has sought to dismantle the disaster response that Americans have come to take for granted.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has reduced its workforce as Trump demands that states, rather than the federal government, shoulder the consequences of major disasters.

The agency has been criticized for its leadership, its slow response to disasters and for withholding its funds for political reasons – last week, a federal judge ruled that Fema cannot withhold grants to Democratic-led states because of differences over immigration policies.

This is a “huge concern” given the growing threat of disasters made worse by the climate crisis, as well as population shifts to risky areas such as Florida and the failure to update infrastructure to deal with global warming, according to Samantha Montano, an emergency management expert at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

“No part of the country is left unscathed, but unfortunately, Fema has become a dysfunctional and ineffective agency,” Montano said. Improvements to Fema since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have been undone under Trump, Montano added, leaving local and state agencies uncertain about how to respond to disasters.

“Fema has laid off people who have unique expertise and cannot be rehired with five hours’ notice. So even if the administration wanted to respond effectively to a disaster, I’m not sure they could do it,” she said.

“We have been very lucky not to have experienced any more serious disasters than this year. We are essentially easy targets for the next major disaster.