The National Maritime and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday it would halt tracking the costs of the country's most expensive disaster, which would cause at least $1 billion in damages.
With this move, insurance companies, researchers and government policymakers will not entrust information without information that will help them understand patterns of major disasters, such as hurricanes, droughts and wildfires, which begin this year. Not all disasters are related to climate change, but these events are becoming more frequent or harsher as the planet gets hotter.
This is the latest initiative from the Trump administration to limit or eliminate climate research. In recent weeks, the administration has rejected the author working on the nation's largest climate assessment, plans to eliminate grants for national parks focused on climate change, and has announced a budget plan that will significantly reduce climate science from the U.S. Geological Survey and Energy and Defense Department.
Researchers and lawmakers criticized the decision Thursday.
Jesse M. Keenan, associate professor and director of climate change and urbanism at Tulane University in New Orleans, said that ending data collection will deprive federal and state governments of efforts to set budgets and make decisions about infrastructure investments.
“That's against logic,” he said. Without a database, “US government flight blindness in terms of extreme weather and climate change costs.”
In a comment about Brusky by Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote, “It's anti-science, anti-safe, anti-American.”
Virginia Iglesias, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado, says few institutions can replicate the types of information provided by the database. “This is one of the most consistent and reliable records of climate-related economic losses in the country,” she said. “The power of databases lies in their reliability.”
The so-called billion dollar disaster – those with costs expanding to more than ten digits are increasing over time. In the 1980s, on average, at least three times a year when records began, adjusted for inflation. The average was 23 per year between 2020 and 2024.
In total, at least 403 such events have occurred in the United States since 1980. Last year there were 27, and in 2023 there was the second Tully (28 people).
Last year's disaster included Hurricane Helen and Milton. This caused around $113 billion in damages and more than 250 deaths in Colorado, around $3 billion in damages, $5 billion in damages, and a year-long drought in most of the country that claimed the lives of more than 100 people.
NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information will “stop tracking these billion-dollar disasters in response to evolving priorities, statutory duties 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 publicly report prices for such disasters. The announcement said the agency would make archived data available from 1980 to 2024. However, the amount of disasters from 2025, including the Los Angeles wildfires and its estimated billions of dollars in damage, will not be tracked and reported.
“We can't fix something that we don't measure,” said Erinsikorsky, director of the Climate Security Centre. “If we lose this information about the costs of these disasters, Americans and Congress will not know the risks that the climate poses to our country.”
Sikorsky said other agencies and agencies may not be able to replicate data collection as they contain their own insurance information that companies are careful about sharing. “It's a pretty unique contribution.”
