CLIMATE CHALLENGESThe Government Just Killed an Essential Way to Assess Climate Risk
Cities, insurers, and the public used the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database to plan for the future. Now what will they do?
Nearly 30 billion-dollar storms rocked the United States last year. Thanks to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s disaster tracking database, we know that catastrophes are getting more expensive overall, and we’re seeing more of them crossing the 10-figure threshold. But the era of billion-dollar disasters is over, because the Trump administration announced late last week that it will no longer update the database.
Policymakers, elected officials, and experts in building, insurance, and real estate say that while the elimination of this essential resource feels politically motivated, its economic value was clear-cut, and often helped cities and companies assess risk with reliable, publicly accessible, and unbiased data.
NOAA created the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database in 1980 to track storms, floods, and other catastrophes that caused at least that much in damage. (NOAA did not respond to a request to comment for this story.) Although such events are rare, they account for more than 80 percent of the nation’s weather- and climate-related damages. In the 45 years since its launch, the database amassed 403 entries, totaling more than $3 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars.
By scrupulously recording this data, NOAA could spot trends, including steep increases in the cost and frequency of disasters from one year to the next and one decade to the next. Insurance companies, state and local governments, researchers, and the public used this information to track climate risk over time, project it into the future, and plan accordingly.
Much of this record-keeping occurred at the National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI. The agency and its trove of climate data happens to sit in Asheville, North Carolina. The city is just one of many in six states that saw the blunt end of Hurricane Helene, the $78.7 billion storm that walloped the southeast in September. Western North Carolina saw one of the highest disaster costs per million residents last year, according to the database’s own calculations.
Local and state authorities gather their own data on disaster costs, but it’s often piecemeal. Avril Pinder, the Buncombe County manager, said the county’s preliminary calculations peg the losses from Helene at something like $80 million, the picture is not as complete as the more comprehensive insights NOAA provides. “We would all do our own [cost estimates] but NOAA has that bigger picture,” Pinder said.
