Extreme weather is an increasingly expensive problem in the US. Last year, fires, droughts and storms caused more than $182 billion in damages — but going forward, the federal government won’t be keeping track.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, announced Thursday it will “retire” its popular database of climate and weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage, a move that follows the Trump administration’s efforts to scrub environmental data across the federal government.
The free public tool tallies up direct economic losses, response costs and the toll of business interruptions tied to the most damaging disasters to strike the US in near real-time. It’s been a staple for the insurance and reinsurance industries, which otherwise need to invest in their own analysis or rely on costly aggregation services. It also provides emergency managers and elected officials with an ongoing look at how increasingly volatile weather made worse by climate change is colliding with heavy development in disaster-prone areas.
While data stretching back to 1980 will still be archived and available, NOAA staff will no longer update the site or crunch the numbers for any weather-related catastrophes that have occurred since this past December, the agency said. That includes the Los Angeles wildfires, recent flooding in the Midwest and Southeast and a March tornado outbreak that killed at least 39 people across the central and eastern US — all multibillion-dollar events, according to various estimates.
NOAA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a message posted on the landing page for the disaster tool, though, it cited “evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes” as reasons for discontinuing the program. The Trump administration has also canceled a handful of NOAA programs and grants that it claims stoke “climate anxiety” and chart future risks due to climate change.
Demonstrating the mounting financial impact of climate change is “not necessarily the goal” of the billion-dollar database, said Kieran Bhatia, a hurricane researcher who’s now the North America climate and sustainability leader at Guy Carpenter, a global reinsurance broker.
“I think what has happened is that there’s a lot of other outside evidence that allows people to connect the dots,” Bhatia said. The US has seen an increasing number of billion-dollar weather disasters. Last year saw the second-most events with 27 billion-dollar disasters, following only 2023’s 28 such events, and researchers have worked to tease out the exact influence of climate change.
There are other ways to get damage estimates, including from the insurance and reinsurance industries. They tend to report on big losses in periodic in-depth reports, said Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. But he said those summaries can’t replace NOAA’s database, which was continuously updated with eye-catching maps and customizable charts “that are more accessible and meaningful to the public.”
That’s valuable to insurers because it gets “the public and public officials to embrace resilience,” said Nutter, who began appealing to the Commerce Department — which oversees NOAA — to protect the billion-dollar disaster program in February. When individuals work to protect their property, that can help “keep insurance premiums down, which is clearly an issue in lots of markets.”
