Climate Central has resurrected the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's billion-dollar disaster database, which the Trump administration discontinued in May. The nonprofit updated the tool to track escalating costs of weather and climate catastrophes amid federal cutbacks. This effort highlights a growing reliance on nonprofits to preserve climate data as government resources diminish.
The Trump administration's decision to halt updates to NOAA's billion-dollar disaster database in May aligned with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes, part of a broader rollback of climate action that shifts disaster monitoring costs to states. Federal agencies have stopped submitting emissions data to the United Nations, terminated climate experts, and removed websites, prompting nonprofits and states to create parallel systems for tracking climate risks.
Climate Central, which analyzes climate and extreme weather data for public understanding, unveiled the updated database on Wednesday. In the first six months of 2025, the US recorded 14 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters costing $101.4 billion, surpassing the annual average of nine. Four of the five costliest years on record have occurred since 2020.
Climatologist Adam Smith, who led the database at NOAA and now at Climate Central, emphasized its value: “We know climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of some types of extreme events. 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.” Smith, with 20 years of experience in climate data analysis, resigned from NOAA amid spending cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency and joined Climate Central to maintain the dataset, which draws from 16 public and private sources. The interface remains similar for consistent comparisons.
In September, Senate Democrats led by Peter Welch of Vermont introduced a bill to restore the dataset under NOAA, arguing it is too vital for political interference, but the bill has not advanced. The Environmental Data Governance Initiative notes that Trump's second term is outpacing his first in climate data deletions. Other nonprofits, including Public Environmental Data Partners, The Data Center, and the Climate Data Collaborative, are triaging data to re-establish scientific baselines.
Local officials, such as those in Asheville, North Carolina, relied on the original database to rebuild the North Fork Reservoir dam, which held during Hurricane Helene. Policy advocate Carly Fabian of Public Citizen called the data a key statistic for motivating policymakers with dollar figures: “That number will only go up, regardless of whether we’re tracking it or not. Tracking it just makes it easier to understand the problem.” States like California are developing their own tools, such as a public wildfire catastrophe model launched in early October. Fabian added, “In the long run, it really should be the government collecting this data, but at the same time, right now, it’s so important not to lose that information and not to have a lag there.”