A climate non-profit has revealed an alarming trend after resurrecting National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research that Donald Trump’s administration defunded in May.

Climate Central took over the NOAA work, whose funding was revoked by the US president, and has now disclosed that climate disasters in the first half of 2025 have been the costliest on record.

Major disasters in the United States, driven by huge wildfires in Los Angeles and storms that lashed other parts of the country, included 14 separate weather-related disasters that each caused at least a billion dollars in damage.

The $101 billion in damages included lost homes, businesses, highways and other infrastructure, leading to a toll higher than it had been for any other first half of a year since records began in 1980.

As of July 28, Climate Central has taken over management of the billion-dollar disaster data set, building upon the foundational work established by the NOAA's National Centres for Environmental Information.

This data set tracks and evaluates weather and climate events in the US that have significant economic and societal impacts and provides insights into the growing costs of extreme weather in a changing climate.

The analysis of the billion-dollar disasters demonstrates the economic impact of extreme weather and climate events in inflation-adjusted dollars.

The Guardian reported that the bulk of the toll from the first half of 2025 was caused by the ferocious wildfires that razed parts of Los Angeles in January, a disaster that destroyed about 16,000 buildings and resulted in the indirect deaths of about 400 people.

At $61 billion in damages, the LA fires are one of the most expensive climate-related disasters on record in the US, and the only top ten event that is not a hurricane.

The Guardian said: “The mounting cost of fires, storms, hurricanes, drought and floods — all worsened by the human-caused climate crisis — was charted over the previous 45 years by [NOAA], until the Trump administration ‘retired’ the data set in May, citing ‘evolving priorities, statutory mandates and staffing changes’.

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

“Over the past four decades, such disasters have become far more savage. The cost of all disasters between 1985 and 1995 was $299 billion, a figure dwarfed by the damages of the past decade – with $1.4 trillion in losses between 2014 and last year.”

Adam Smith headed the billion-dollar disaster project at NOAA before ending his 20-year spell at the agency in May amid a purge of the federal workforce by Mr Trump.

The Guardian quoted Mr Smith: “This data set is simply too important to not be updated; we were getting requests from the private sector, local communities and academia for this information.”

He said: “Climate Central is trying to step into the void of information to recover some of the lost expertise and tools that society needs access to. We are in a sort of triage situation where we are trying to save and continue as much as we can. We are doing the best we can to do this.”