The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday said it would stop tracking the cost of the country’s most expensive disasters, those that cause at least $1 billion in damage.
The move would leave insurance companies, researchers and government policymakers without information to help understand the patterns of major disasters such as hurricanes, drought or wildfires, and their economic consequences, starting this year. Those events are becoming more frequent or severe as the planet grows hotter, although not all disasters are linked to climate change.
It’s the latest effort from the Trump administration to restrict or eliminate climate research. In recent weeks, the administration has dismissed the authors working on the nation’s biggest climate assessment; planned to eliminate National Parks grants focused on climate change; and released a budget plan that would cut significantly climate science from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Energy and Defense departments.
Researchers and lawmakers criticized Thursday’s decision.
Jesse M. Keenan, associate professor and director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University in New Orleans, said ending the data collection would cripple efforts by federal and state governments to set budgets or make decisions on investment in infrastructure.
“It defies logic,” he said. Without the database, “the U.S. government’s flying blind as to the cost of extreme weather and climate change.”
Few institutions can duplicate the kind of information provided by the database, said Virginia Iglesias, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It’s one of the most consistent and trusted records of climate-related economic loss in the country,” she said. “The power of the database lies in its credibility.”
So-called billion-dollar disasters — those with costs that balloon to seven figures are more — have been increasing over time.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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