Trump killed a crucial disaster database. This nonprofit just saved it.

As the Trump administration removes climate data and shuts down resources tracking the effects of global warming, nonprofits, state governments and independent scientists are rushing to preserve the information.

Last week, Climate Central revived one of the most famous of the lost records: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's billion-dollar disaster database. The tool allowed policymakers, insurers and ordinary people to track how hurricanes, floods and other disasters were becoming increasingly costly—until the agency said in May that it would no longer update the database “in line with changing priorities, legislative mandates and personnel changes.” The move was part of the administration's broader effort to roll back climate action and shift more of the cost of monitoring and responding to natural disasters to states.

Accompanying these changes is a shift in who controls the facts about the climate crisis. Since federal agencies are no longer reporting emissions data to the United Nations, dismissal of climate expertsAnd removal of websitesand taking other steps to rollback climate reportsA patchwork of nonprofits and states is trying to fill that gap by creating a special, parallel system to track the risks Americans face.

Climate Central, which analyzes climate and extreme weather data and explains their impacts to the public, unveiled an updated database on Wednesday. In the first six months of 2025, the country experienced $14 billion in weather and climate disasters at a cost of $101.4 billion. This is already well above the annual average of nine people. Four of the five most expensive years on record occurred after 2020.

“We know that climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of some types of extreme events,” said climate scientist Adam Smith, who led NOAA's database and does so again at Climate Central. “And we know that more damage to infrastructure at these extremes results in more severe damage. Data and information products like this help us understand how to build a stronger, more resilient future.”

In September, a group of Senate Democrats led by Peter Welch of Vermont has introduced a bill to restore the data set within NOAA, arguing that the information is too important to be subject to political whims. His bill, however, went nowhere, and in the meantime, Climate Central hired Smith. He has 20 years of experience analyzing climate and extreme weather data, and was excited to see the data combine and analyze information from 16 government and private sources. When the Office of Government Effectiveness came to NOAA with the intention of cutting costs, “it seemed pretty clear where it was going,” Smith said. He resigned “following tens of thousands of other federal employees” and began looking for a place to continue his work. Climate Central allowed him to “compare apples to apples” with the work he did at NOAA – even interface looks similar.

Trump's second term is outpacing his first in terms of the amount of climate data being removed, according to the Environmental Data Governance Initiative. Nonprofits like Climate Central, joined by organizations like Public Environmental Data Partners, The Data Center and Climate Data Collaborative, Smith said, are “triaging and trying to reestablish a baseline of moving forward on what can be scientifically done and what can be preserved.”

Data deletion is a problem not only for researchers and insurers, but also for local and state governments who rely on resources such as the billion-dollar disaster database. justify the need to create sustainable infrastructure. For example, officials in Asheville, North Carolina, relied on the tool when deciding whether to rebuild a dam on the North Fork Reservoir. This work is credited with keeping the structure from collapsing during Hurricane Helen.

When Carly Fabian, a policy advocate at Public Citizen, talks to policymakers about climate disasters, “the statistics and data from the billion-dollar disaster database were one of my favorite statistics,” she said. “It was very strange not to have such an action figure.” Policymakers tend to be motivated by specific dollar amounts rather than vague predictions of future crises, she said. “This number is only going to grow, whether we track it or not,” she said. “Tracking just makes it easier to understand the problem.”

Some states are working to create their own databases of the climate and weather hazards they face: California, for example, has begun creating Forest fire public disaster model at the beginning of October. And as more states follow suit, nonprofit efforts like the revived billion-dollar disaster dataset are becoming “just a piece of the puzzle,” Fabian said.

“In the long term, this data really should be collected by the government,” she said. “But at the same time, it’s so important now not to lose that information and keep up.”