The administration of US President Donald Trump is eliminating a database on extreme weather that has tracked the cost of disasters for 45 years.
CNN reports on the new cuts in the United States, which are related to climate change observations.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced that its well-known database of “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” will be “closed” – a move that will make it virtually impossible for the public to track the cost of extreme weather and climate events.
The Weather, Climate, and Oceans Agency is also discontinuing other products, as it recently announced, largely due to staff reductions. NOAA is narrowing the range of services it provides, scrutinizing climate-related programs in particular.
The database on natural disasters will be archived and not updated after 2024. It allowed taxpayers, media, and researchers to track the cost of natural disasters, covering extremes from hurricanes to hail.
“Its closure is yet another blow by the Trump administration to the public's understanding of how fossil fuel pollution is changing the world around us and making extreme weather events more costly. “The Trump administration has focused on destroying climate-related programs and agencies, whether they are involved in tracking global warming and its effects or not,” CNN said.
Why this database was important
The NOAA database collected information on losses from the entire insurance industry, as well as from other public and private sources.
According to its data, in the period from 1980 to 2024, an average of 9 weather and climate disasters costing at least $1 billion each occurred annually, although over the past 5 years, this average annual figure has jumped to 24. The record for a single year was 28 events in 2023.
A $1 billion database of disasters is not easy to replicate, for example, by a nonprofit or private company, as it contains a lot of nonpublic data that private businesses share with the government.
“What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not only its decades-old standardized methodology, but also the fact that it relies on proprietary and non-public data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, local government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise unavailable to most researchers,” said Jeremy Porter, head of climate impacts and co-founder of First Street, a climate risk financial modeling firm, in an interview with CNN.
As a reminder, in late April, it became known that representatives of the Trump administration are trying to prevent the International Energy Agency from providing data that, according to the US government, favor renewable energy over fossil fuels.
