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A key database measuring the economic impact of large-scale disasters is being terminated by the Trump administration, dealing a severe blow to the tracking of extreme weather events that has existed for decades.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database was listed on the agency’s “Notice of Change” site this week. Under the “type of change” it was undergoing, NOAA stated that the “product will be retired.”
There will be “no updates beyond calendar year 2024” to the tracker, NOAA elaborated. No reason was given for why the database was terminated, but the action is on par with a series of steps the Trump administration has taken since January to overturn what little progress the country has made to address the climate crisis.
The ending of the database comes as the administration has already fired around 2,200 employees at NOAA, with more cuts to come as the White House budget proposal calls for gutting around 30 percent of the agency’s total funding.
An archive of the database, which has existed since 1980, will remain on NOAA’s website, at least for now, the agency said.
The tracker is a very popular tool among government agencies and nonprofits examining the long-term effects of the climate crisis, as well as among private insurance companies that examine the data to determine pricing.
Since its start, the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database has tracked 403 total billion-dollar events, averaging around nine disasters per year. However, the average observed over the past five years has been 24 events per year, indicating that the climate crisis is worsening.
Last year, there were 27 such events observed by NOAA, the second-highest ever recorded (just shy of the 28 events that were observed in 2023).
Climate experts condemned the Trump administration’s termination of the database.
“What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and non-public data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers,” said Jeremy Porter, cofounder of First Street, a climate risk financial modeling company, speaking to CNN about the matter.
“You can’t fix what you don’t measure,” Erin Sikorsky, director of The Center for Climate and Security, told The New York Times. “If we lose this information about the costs of these disasters, the American people and Congress won’t know what risks climate is posing to our country.”
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