Private Sector Revives Climate Disaster Database After Federal Tracking Was Halted

The private sector has stepped in to revive a major climate and weather disaster database after federal tracking was halted, offering new insight into the growing cost of extreme weather in the United States.

According to a new report from Climate Central, the nation experienced 23 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2025, totaling $115 billion in damages. That figure places last year among the most expensive on record, despite the absence of a landfalling hurricane.

Climate Central’s newly launched Billion-Dollar Disasters Database continues the work previously done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which stopped updating the dataset last spring. The nonprofit hired Adam Smith, the longtime NOAA analyst who helped create and maintain the original database, allowing the methodology and tracking to continue without interruption.

The database has long been used by researchers, insurers, real estate professionals, and the media to assess the financial toll of natural disasters, primarily through property losses tied to hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and severe storms.

The report shows that 2025 ranked third for the number of billion-dollar disasters since record-keeping began in 1980. Severe weather events such as tornadoes and hailstorms reached a record high, with 21 qualifying disasters. The year also saw a rare billion-dollar drought in the western United States, driven largely by extreme heat.

The most expensive disaster of the year was the January Los Angeles wildfires, which killed more than two dozen people and destroyed over 16,000 structures, resulting in an estimated $61.2 billion in damages. A March tornado outbreak across central states followed, causing $11 billion in losses and claiming 43 lives.

Climate Central also found that the time between billion-dollar disasters is shrinking. In the 1980s, such events occurred about once every 82 days. Over the past decade, that average dropped to 16 days, with 2025 seeing an average of just 10 days between major disasters.

Researchers say the rising costs are driven by a combination of climate change, which is intensifying certain extreme weather events, and continued population growth and development in vulnerable areas.

Climate Central plans to expand the database in the coming years, potentially tracking smaller-scale disasters and further analyzing long-term trends.

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