DISASTERSTrump Killed a Crucial Disaster Database. This Nonprofit Just Saved It.
Climate Central revived the federal list of billion-dollar disasters, another example of nonprofits providing data the government deletes.
As the Trump administration deletes climate data and shutters resources that track the impacts of a warming world, nonprofits, state-level governments, and independent scientists are rushing to preserve the information.
Last week, Climate Central resurrected one of the most prominent of those lost records: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s billion-dollar disaster database. The tool allowed policymakers, insurers, and regular people to track how hurricanes, floods, and other catastrophes are growing more expensive — until the agency said in May that it would no longer update the database “in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.” The move was part of the administration’s broader effort to roll back climate action and push more of the cost of disaster monitoring and response on to states.
Those changes come alongside a shift in who controls the facts about the climate crisis. With federal agencies no longer submitting emissions data to the United Nations, terminating climate experts, and taking down websites, and taking other steps to roll back climate reporting, a patchwork of nonprofits and states is trying to fill the gap — creating an ad hoc parallel system for tracking the risks Americans face.
Climate Central, which analyzes climate and extreme weather data and explains its impacts to the public, unveiled the updated database on Wednesday. In the first six months of 2025, the nation recorded 14 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters costing $101.4 billion. That’s already far above the annual average of nine. Four of the five costliest years on record have occurred since 2020.
“We know climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of some types of extreme events,” said climatologist Adam Smith, who led the database under NOAA and is doing so again at Climate Central. “And we know more infrastructure in harm’s way to those extremes results in higher damages. Data and information products like this help us understand how to build a more robust, resilient future.”
In September, a group of Senate Democrats led by Peter Welch of Vermont introduced a bill to restore the dataset under NOAA, arguing that the information is too vital to be subjected to political whim. His bill, however, hasn’t gone anywhere, and in the meantime, Climate Central hired Smith.
