The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday it would stop tracking the cost of the country's most expensive disaster, which caused at least $1 billion in damage.
The move will leave insurers, researchers and government policy makers without information to help understand the patterns of major disasters such as hurricanes, droughts or wildfires and their economic consequences starting this year. As the planet grows, these events become more frequent or serious, although not all disasters are related to climate change.
This is the latest effort by the Trump administration to limit or eliminate climate research. In recent weeks, the government has rejected the authors engaged in the country’s largest climate assessment, plans to cancel a climate change-focused national park grant and released a budget plan that will significantly cut climate science from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Energy and Defense.
Researchers and lawmakers criticized Thursday's decision.
Jesse M, associate professor and director of the Center for Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, New Orleans.
“This ignores logic,” he said. Without a database, “the U.S. government is blind to the costs of extreme weather and climate change.”
“This is anti-science, anti-security and anti-American,” Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote in a comment to Bruinsky.
Virginia Iglesias, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado, said few institutions can replicate the information provided by the database. “This is one of the most stable and trustworthy records of climate-related economic losses in the country,” she said. “The power of the database lies in its credibility.”
Over time, the so-called billion-dollar disasters – those that cost increased seven figures. In the 1980s, when records began, the average annual inflation adjustment was just over three per year. During the period from 2020 to 2024, the average annual rate was 23.
Since 1980, there have been at least 403 such incidents in the United States. There were 27 last year, second only to 2023 (28).
Last year's disasters included Hurricanes Helen and Hurricanes Milton, which caused about $113 billion in compensation and more than 250 deaths, a severe hail in Colorado that caused about $3 billion in damages, causing $5 billion in damages in most parts of the country a year, and causing $5 billion in damages, and claiming that more than 100 people have been exposed to heat exposure.
NOAA's National Environmental Information Center plans to stop tracking these billion-dollar disasters in response to “evolving priorities, statutory mandates and staffing changes,” the agency said in an email.
When asked, the agency did not say whether NOAA or another branch of the federal agency would continue to track and publicly report price tags for such disasters. The announcement said the agency will provide archived data from 1980 to 2024. However, the number of disasters starting in 2025, such as Los Angeles wildfires and their estimated billions of dollars in losses, will not be tracked and reported to the public.
“You can’t fix what you can’t measure,” said Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security. “If we lose information about the costs of these disasters, then the American people and Congress don’t know what risks climate issues to our country.”
Ms Sikorsky said other agencies or agencies may not be able to replicate data collection because it includes proprietary insurance information that companies want to share. “This is a very unique contribution.”
