In First Six Months, Cost of Weather Catastrophes Escalated at a Record Pace

Climate|In First Six Months, Cost of Weather Catastrophes Escalated at a Record Pace

The Trump administration this year stopped updating a federal database that tracked the cost of extreme weather and informed an annual list of hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damage.

But the cost of such catastrophes continues to escalate at a record pace. That’s according to a revived version of the database released Wednesday by the nonprofit group Climate Central.

Through the first six months of this year, disasters across the United States caused more than $100 billion in damage, the most expensive start to any year on record, it found. Fourteen disasters each caused at least $1 billion in damage through the first half of the year, the researchers found.

The tally comes as President Trump has said he wants to eventually shift the burden of disaster relief and recovery from the federal government onto states. And there are signs that is already happening. The administration has created a panel that is expected to recommend changes to the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency operates by the end of November.

More than half of the costs from extreme weather so far this year stem from the wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January, which nearly doubled the record for fire damage, adjusted for inflation, said Adam Smith, the senior climate impacts scientist at Climate Central.

Mr. Smith led management of the federal database for 15 years as a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist. He left the agency in May, shortly after the Trump administration said it would stop reporting disaster damage costs. The government had maintained that database since the 1990s, with data going back to 1980.

He is continuing the work at Climate Central, using the same methodology — and plans to eventually gather even more detailed disaster data.

“This data set was simply too important to stop being updated,” Mr. Smith said.

A NOAA spokeswoman, Kim Doster, said the agency ”appreciates” that the database found “a funding mechanism other than the taxpayer dime” as NOAA focuses on “sound, unbiased research over projects based in uncertainty and speculation.”

The information is used by the insurance industry, policymakers and researchers to understand and plan for a future in which — just as in the present — storms, floods, fires and other hazards are becoming more frequent, intense and damaging. The average number of billion-dollar disasters has surged from three per year during the 1980s to 19 annually during the last 10 years, the data show.

That is not entirely a function of changes in weather extremes. As more people and businesses move into areas that are prone to floods and wildfire, more property is vulnerable to damage.

Mr. Smith said that while those factors might complicate the analysis, there is a common explanation for disaster data trends: “The rise in damage relates to human activities.”

Climate change, the result of humans’ burning of fossil fuels, is linked to an increase in some types of extreme weather. Warm oceans are allowing hurricanes to intensify more rapidly. Warm air is capable of carrying heavier amounts of moisture, which is raining down faster and causing extreme flooding. And heat and droughts are drying out vegetation, creating fuel for wildfires.

Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies climate change’s effects on communities, said the database serves as a powerful signal of both changing weather extremes and “decision making that is costing us a lot of money.”

The billion dollar disaster list “has been one of the most effective bridges to the public communicating the increasing costs of disasters,” Mr. Rumbach said. “It’s a really powerful tool for communicating to the public this trend we see.”

Damage from the Los Angeles wildfires exceeded $60 billion, the Climate Central report found. That was nearly twice as costly as fires that burned through Northern California, including the town of Paradise, in 2018.

Severe storms — which brought tornadoes, hail and floods to much of the country — accounted for the rest of the nationwide damage, which totaled $101.4 billion between January and June, according to the database. A tornado outbreak that struck the central and southern United States from March 14 to 16 caused $10.6 billion in damage.

Mr. Smith said Climate Central plans to update the database in January with all of the 2025 data. Researchers are already evaluating one candidate for potential inclusion on the list: the July 4 floods that struck central Texas, killing at least 136 people.

At the same time, it has been an unexpectedly quiet Atlantic hurricane season. If the United States makes it past November without landfall by a tropical storm or hurricane, it may mean a relative break from an otherwise harrowing stretch: Four of the five most costly disaster seasons have occurred since 2017, Mr. Smith.

The fifth? It was 2005, a year of historic damage from Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma.