The federal government used to keep track of extreme weather disasters. Now it’s up to a nonprofit

By Andrew Freedman, CNN

(CNN) — The Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Database, which the Trump administration “retired” in May, has relaunched outside of the government using the same methodology. In its first update at the new site, the database shows that the first six months of 2025 have been the most expensive first six months of any year since 1980.

The Billion-Dollar Database tracks the financial costs of property and other infrastructure destroyed by extreme weather disasters in the United States, focusing on events that caused $1 billion or more in damages. So far, 2025 has racked up $101.4 billion in such losses. The climate research nonprofit Climate Central now hosts the database and makes this information available to insurers, policy makers, broadcast meteorologists and ordinary citizens.

The database was rebuilt and will be maintained by its previous administrator Adam Smith, a former economist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency which used to host it. Smith found 14 billion-dollar disasters in the first half of this year, including the Los Angeles wildfires in January and a tornado outbreak across the central US in mid-March. More billion-dollar disasters are likely to be added to the list before 2025 is over.

Without the database, the public would have no easy way to track the cost of extreme weather events, many of which are becoming more common and severe because of climate change.

But climate change is not the sole reason the database shows an upward trend in both the number of billion-dollar disasters and the amount they cost. Population growth and an increase in the number of buildings in harm’s way are the dominant factors, according to Smith.

“Either way you look at it, the rise in damages relates to human activities and choices, and so you need to use information in context to better evaluate future choices,” he said.

The frequency of billion-dollar disasters has particularly increased in the last decade, Smith said, occurring nearly twice as often compared to the 30-year inflation-adjusted average.

Between 1980 and 2024, there were nine such disasters on average each year. In the past five years, that annual average has jumped to 24. The record for a single year was 28 events in 2023.

In the first six months of 2025, the list of billion-dollar disasters is mostly comprised of severe thunderstorms and tornado outbreaks, reflecting the conspicuous absence of landfalling hurricanes so far this season.

However, the LA fires in January cost $61.2 billion, making them the costliest wildfires in US history, according to Climate Central.

Climate Central hired Smith after the NOAA economist took early retirement this year, as part of the Trump administration’s push to shrink the federal bureaucracy.

NOAA’s official list stops at the end of 2024. Climate Central’s version picks up in 2025 and will continue from there.

The relaunched list uses the same methodology as the old NOAA one, Smith said. It relies on data from insurance companies and other sources, some of which is proprietary, to tally up total losses. The decision to discontinue the database was due in part to Smith’s exit from NOAA. It would have been a difficult task for the agency to continue without him, but it could have done it, he said.

The choice to discontinue the database was in keeping with the administration’s focus on cutting climate change datasets and programs across federal agencies. But there were calls for it to continue from multiple sectors.

“This dataset was simply too important to stop being updated. Demand for its revival actually came from several aspects of industry and society, including decision makers in the insurance, reinsurance risk space, academia, Congress and local communities,” Smith said.

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