A non-profit has restored a database on the costs of natural disasters deleted by Trump: a record amount of damage in the first half of the year.
Last May, the Trump administration deleted a federal database that had listed the most economically costly climate disasters in the United States since 1980. However, the “wipe in the towel” could not erase the extreme climatic events, which in the first half of 2025 presented a very high bill for the USA, exceeding 100 billion dollars in damage.
Climate Central, a non-profit organization involved in scientific research and dissemination on the climate crisis, reports this. The group saved the federal data from oblivion and posted an updated version of the same database on its site.
For the benefit of citizens
As an article on The VergeClimate Central’s effort is one of the many “acts of rebellion” carried out in recent months by the US scientific community in the face of attempts to sabotage science by the country’s current administration.
Fundless and jobless researchers have worked tirelessly to save from oblivion information critical to the health, safety and daily lives of citizens: in this case, the deleted database served to help decision-makers in urban planning, inform residents in vulnerable areas and direct efforts to adapt buildings and other infrastructure to natural disasters.
The most expensive start ever
In the first 6 months of 2025, the overall cost of climate-related natural disasters in the United States was more than $100 billion (over €86 billion), the costliest first half-year ever.
Damage from the fires that devastated Los Angeles in January cost over 60 billion dollars (over 51 billion euros) and the rest of the contribution came from tornadoes, floods and other events linked to intense rainfall, for a total of 101.4 billion in damages due to climate disasters from January to June 2025. In the first part of the year, individual events that caused costs exceeding one billion dollars, condition essential to be included in the database, there were 14.
Comparison with the past
The average number of disasters costing more than a billion dollars has risen from 3 per year during the 1980s to 19 per year in the last 10 years. Taking inflation into account, tens of billions of dollars a year were spent on repairing climate disasters in the 1990s; last year (for the whole of 2024) it reached 182.7 billion dollars (over 157 billion euros). Total spending for 2025 will be updated in January 2026.
Excess heat
The increase in climate disasters is linked to excess temperatures caused by CO2 and methane emissions from human activities.
Oceans that are too warm turbocharge hurricanes, intensifying them very quickly; Prolonged droughts provide fuel for fires, overly moisture-laden air causes more prolonged, sudden and extreme rains. A minority part of the calculated damages is instead due to the fact that more and more people live in areas vulnerable to climate disasters (for example near the coasts).
