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Climate resilience is most visible in physical defenses and materials, but it relies on information infrastructure.
Many year-end disaster reports—recaps and analyses of 2025’s biggest climate disasters—have been cropping up in recent weeks. And most of these reports cite the same source: Climate Central, which reports that 23 separate events in the U.S. in 2025 cost $115 billion in damages. The figures are worth digging into—but the bigger story is the fragile data infrastructure behind them, and why it matters for how risk is priced, capital is allocated, and resilience is planned.
The U.S.’s official billion-dollar weather and climate disasters database, maintained by NOAA since 1980, was discontinued in May 2025. For decades, this resource had been the gold standard for tracking catastrophic weather events—providing standardized, inflation-adjusted cost data that insurers, real estate developers, public agencies, and investors relied on for risk assessment and capital allocation. Its discontinuation could have created a critical blind spot, precisely when billion-dollar disasters are happening more frequently.
However, nonprofit research organization Climate Central moved quickly to keep the record from going dark. They hired Adam Smith, the senior scientist who had led NOAA's program for 15 years, to lead redevelopment. Smith brought methodology, data partnerships, and expertise, integrating data sources like insurance claims and crop damage assessments into a coherent framework. By October 2025, Climate Central had relaunched the database with data through June 2025; last week, they released their analysis of weather and climate disasters through the end of 2025.
This continuity will allow the data on climate disaster damages and costs to remain available and standardized for decision-makers across the resilience ecosystem, who need trustworthy, consistent data to plan effectively. But the billion-dollar database’s story could have ended differently, and it still might for other critical climate risk data resources.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), another pillar of climate and weather science, faces similar threats: the research center that helps forecast wildfire conditions and develops tornado warning systems has been targeted for "breaking up" by the Trump administration. If NCAR doesn’t experience the same soft landing that the billion-dollar disaster database has had, the effects could ripple into many industries—agriculture, insurance, utilities, logistics—that use their data for wind, weather, and disaster prediction.
Resilience is most visible in physical defenses and materials, but it relies on information infrastructure. When that information survives institutional upheaval, the whole ecosystem benefits from a credible foundation and a shared understanding of the climate risks that lie ahead.
Stay tuned for The Epicenter’s take on what leaders in public finance, real estate, the insurance sector, and beyond can learn from 2025’s billion-dollar climate disasters.
Read more about insurance on The Epicenter here.
Read more about resilient public infrastructure and government solutions on The Epicenter here.
Read more about resilient real estate on The Epicenter here.
10 days
On average, the U.S. had just 10 days between billion-dollar disasters in 2025, compared to over 80 days in the 1980s.
Source: Climate Central.
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The Epicenter helps decision makers understand climate risks and discover viable resilience solutions. The Epicenter is an affiliated publication of The Resiliency Company, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to inspiring and empowering humanity to adapt to the accelerating challenges of the next 100+ years.
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