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

As the Trump administration suppresses climate data and ends resources that track the impacts of global warming, nonprofits, state governments and independent scientists are racing to preserve the information.

Last week, Climate Central resurrected one of the most important lost documents: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s billion-dollar disaster database. The tool allowed policymakers, insurers and everyday citizens to track the rising cost of hurricanes, floods and other disasters — until the agency said in May that it would no longer update the database “based on changing priorities, statutory mandates and personnel changes.” The move is part of a broader administration effort to roll back climate action and shift more of the cost of monitoring and responding to disasters to states.

With these changes comes a shift in who controls the facts about the climate crisis. As federal agencies no longer submit emissions data to the United Nations, fire climate experts, take down websites and take other steps to roll back climate reporting, a patchwork of nonprofits and states is trying to fill the void — creating an ad hoc parallel system to track the risks Americans face.

Climate Central, which analyzes extreme climate and weather data and explains their impacts to the public, unveiled the updated database on Wednesday. In the first six months of 2025, the country recorded $14 billion in weather and climate disasters costing $101.4 billion. This is already well above the annual average of nine. Four of the five costliest years on record have occurred since 2020.

“We know that climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of certain types of extreme events,” said climate scientist Adam Smith, who ran the database under NOAA and is doing so again at Climate Central. “And we know that more infrastructure exposed to extreme risks leads to greater damage. Data and information products like this help us understand how to build a stronger, more resilient future.”

In September, a group of Democratic senators led by Peter Welch of Vermont introduced a bill to restore the data set under the umbrella of NOAA, arguing that the information is too vital 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, which combines and analyzes information gleaned from 16 public and private sources. When the Department of Government Efficiency approached NOAA, determined to cut spending, “it seemed pretty clear where they were going,” Smith said. He quit “like tens of thousands of other federal workers” and looked for a place to continue his work. Climate Central allowed him to “make an apples-to-apples comparison” with the work he did at NOAA – even the interface looks similar.

According to the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, Trump’s second term surpasses his first in terms of the amount of climate data deleted. Nonprofits like Climate Central — joined by Public Environmental Data Partners, The Data Center and Climate Data Collaborative — are, in Smith’s words, “sorting through and trying to reestablish a baseline for moving forward on what can be done scientifically and what can be sustained.”

Data suppression is not only a problem for researchers and insurers, but also for local and state officials who rely on resources like the billion-dollar disaster database to make the case for building resilient infrastructure. Officials in Asheville, North Carolina, for example, relied on this tool in deciding whether to rebuild the North Fork Reservoir Dam. This work is believed to have prevented the structure from breaking apart during Hurricane Helene.

When Carly Fabian, policy advocate at Public Citizen, speaks to policymakers about climate disaster, “the statistics and data from the Billion-Dollar Disaster Database was one of my go-to statistics,” she said. “It’s been really strange not having that go-to number.” Policymakers tend to be motivated by specific amounts, not vague predictions of future crises, she said. “That number is only going to increase whether we track it or not,” she said. “Following it just helps you understand the problem better. »

Some states are working to create their own databases of the climate and weather risks they face: California, for example, decided to create a public wildfire disaster model in early October. And as more states follow their lead, nonprofit efforts such as the revival of a billion-dollar disaster data set are “just one piece of the puzzle,” Fabian said.

“In the long run, it should really be the government collecting this data,” she said. “But at the same time, right now, it’s very important not to lose that information and not have a lag.”