Weather disasters in first half of 2025 were the costliest on record, data shows

The first half of this year was the costliest on record for weather and climate disasters in the United States, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the nonprofit Climate Central.

It’s information the public might never have known: This spring, the Trump administration eliminated the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program that tracked weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damage. The researcher who led this work, Adam Smith, left NOAA following this decision.

Climate Central, a research group focused on the effects of climate change, hired Smith to redevelop the database, which includes records dating back to 1980.

According to the organization’s new analysis, 14 weather events exceeded $1 billion in damage in the first six months of 2025. January’s wildfires in Los Angeles were, by far, the costliest natural disaster so far this year: They caused more than $61 billion in damage. It also makes it the costliest wildfire on record.

The findings show how the costs of weather and climate disasters continue to rise as extreme weather becomes more frequent and intense, and populations spread into areas prone to costly destruction from wildfires and floods.

The report itself is also an example of how nonprofit groups are increasingly taking over federal projects that once tracked and quantified the effects of climate change, as the Trump administration cuts climate science. President Donald Trump has called climate change a “fraud.” His administration has cut funding for clean energy projects and is trying to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollution that causes global warming.

Jennifer Brady, a senior data analyst and research director at Climate Central who worked on the project, said the shutdown of NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster database upset the nonprofit’s staff, who decided to take matters into their own hands.

“This has always been one of our favorite datasets. It tells so many different stories. It tells the story of climate change. It tells where people live, how they live in risky situations,” Brady said. “We’re happy to bring it back.”

Kim Doster, a NOAA spokeswoman, said the agency “appreciates that the Billion Dollar Disaster Product project has found a funding mechanism other than taxpayer dollars.”

“NOAA will continue to refocus its resources on products that adhere to the President’s executive order restoring gold standard science, prioritizing robust, unbiased research,” Doster said in an email.

The database was a politically polarizing project. House Republicans complained about the program to NOAA’s 2024 administrator, expressing concerns about what they described as “misleading data.” Last month, Senate Democrats introduced legislation that would require NOAA to release the data set and update it twice a year, saying lawmakers use the reports to inform disaster funding decisions. But the bill remains in committee and has little chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate.

Last month, a Trump administration official told NBC News that NOAA ended the database project because of uncertainties about how it estimated disaster costs. The official said the project costs about $300,000 a year, requires a lot of man hours and the data “serves no decision-making purpose and remains, at best, purely informational.”

“This data is often used to advance the narrative that climate change is making disasters more frequent, more extreme and more costly, without taking into account other factors such as increased development in floodplains or other areas affected by weather or the cyclical nature of climate in various regions,” the official said at the time.

Brady, however, said the database has consistently recognized demographic changes and climate variability as important factors in the cost of disasters.

Climate Central’s work uses the same methodology and data sources as NOAA’s database, she said. These sources include, among others, National Flood Insurance Program claims, NOAA storm event data, and private property insurance data.

The analysis takes into account the “direct costs” of disasters, such as damage to buildings, infrastructure and crops. It does not take into account other considerations, including loss of life, health-related costs from disasters, or economic losses of “natural capital” like forests or wetlands. Data is adjusted for inflation.

The new analysis for the first half of 2025 indicates that this year is on track to be one of the costliest on record, even though no hurricanes made landfall in the continental United States.

Last year, NOAA recorded 27 disasters worth $182.7 billion. This is the second highest number of billion-dollar disasters in the report’s history, after 2023.

Climate Central isn’t the only group stepping in to recreate the work the federal government once did as the Trump administration cuts climate science.

A group of laid-off NOAA employees launched Climate.us, a nonprofit successor to Climate.gov, a federal website that once provided data and analysis to explain climate issues to the general public. The site went dark this summer.

Rebecca Lindsey, who edited the Climate.gov site before she was laid off in February, said she and other NOAA employees who co-founded the nonprofit have raised about $160,000. They plan to host the Climate.gov archives on the new site and begin publishing new articles on climate change in the coming weeks.

“We’re taking this information and making sure that when people need answers about what’s happening with the climate, they’ll be able to find them,” Lindsey said.

The American Geophysical Union and the American Mogenic Society also announced plans to release a special collection of research focused on climate change, after the Trump administration told scientists volunteering to work on the National Climate Assessment — a comprehensive synthesis of research on climate change and its effects in the United States — that it was no longer needed.

The administration laid off staff from the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which organized the National Climate Assessment and coordinated climate research programs among different federal agencies.

Walter Robinson, publications commissioner for the American Meteorological Society, said the National Climate Assessment had been “effectively overturned” by the administration’s decisions, which he viewed as an “abrogation” of federal responsibility.

The new collection cannot replace the assessment, he added, but it aims to bring together in one place the latest scientific knowledge on the effects of climate change in the United States. The research will be published regularly in several scientific journals.

“People are stepping up,” Robinson said of his group’s efforts. “As scientists, we do what we can.”