Why Trump’s Plan to Stop Tallying Weather Losses Matters to the Insurance Industry

Extreme weather is an increasingly expensive problem in the US. Last year, fires, droughts and storms caused more than $182 billion in damages — but going forward, the federal government won’t be keeping track.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, announced Thursday it will “retire” its popular database of climate and weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage, a move that follows the Trump administration’s efforts to scrub environmental data across the federal government.

The free public tool tallies up direct economic losses, response costs and the toll of business interruptions tied to the most damaging disasters to strike the US in near real-time. It’s been a staple for the insurance and reinsurance industries, which otherwise need to invest in their own analysis or rely on costly aggregation services. It also provides emergency managers and elected officials with an ongoing look at how increasingly volatile weather made worse by climate change is colliding with heavy development in disaster-prone areas.

While data stretching back to 1980 will still be archived and available, NOAA staff will no longer update the site or crunch the numbers for any weather-related catastrophes that have occurred since this past December, the agency said. That includes the Los Angeles wildfires, recent flooding in the Midwest and Southeast and a March tornado outbreak that killed at least 39 people across the central and eastern US — all multibillion-dollar events, according to various estimates.

NOAA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a message posted on the landing page for the disaster tool, though, it cited “evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes” as reasons for discontinuing the program. The Trump administration has also canceled a handful of NOAA programs and grants that it claims stoke “climate anxiety” and chart future risks due to climate change.

Demonstrating the mounting financial impact of climate change is “not necessarily the goal” of the billion-dollar database, said Kieran Bhatia, a hurricane researcher who’s now the North America climate and sustainability leader at Guy Carpenter, a global reinsurance broker.

“I think what has happened is that there’s a lot of other outside evidence that allows people to connect the dots,” Bhatia said. The US has seen an increasing number of billion-dollar weather disasters. Last year saw the second-most events with 27 billion-dollar disasters, following only 2023’s 28 such events, and researchers have worked to tease out the exact influence of climate change.

There are other ways to get damage estimates, including from the insurance and reinsurance industries. They tend to report on big losses in periodic in-depth reports, said Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. But he said those summaries can’t replace NOAA’s database, which was continuously updated with eye-catching maps and customizable charts “that are more accessible and meaningful to the public.”

That’s valuable to insurers because it gets “the public and public officials to embrace resilience,” said Nutter, who began appealing to the Commerce Department — which oversees NOAA — to protect the billion-dollar disaster program in February. When individuals work to protect their property, that can help “keep insurance premiums down, which is clearly an issue in lots of markets.”

California might be the poster child for skyrocketing rates or insurers leaving the state altogether, but red states have also struggled to keep insurance available and affordable. They’re also disproportionately affected by billion-dollar disasters, according to NOAA’s database.

Florida leads the nation with at least $450 billion worth of damage since 1980, followed by Texas with at least $440 billion and Louisiana with $310 billion. Together, the three states account for more than 41% of all financial losses chronicled by NOAA.

Julie Kay Roberts, who was NOAA’s deputy chief of staff in Trump’s first administration but has since broken with the president, said that those states that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024 will likely continue to be among the hardest hit by disasters, even if the database no longer reflects the damage. With this upcoming hurricane season right around the corner — and which is expected to have above average activity — the losses could start soon, even if NOAA doesn’t record them.

“I guess if they don’t talk about it, then it doesn’t happen,” Roberts said.

Photo: Generated with AI, AdobeStock

Topics Profit Loss Market