US to stop tracking cost of extreme weather fuelled by climate change

Euronews

09-05-2025

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will no longer track the cost of climate change-fueled weather disasters, including floods, heat waves, wildfires and more.
It is the latest example of changes to the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government resources on climate change.
NOAA falls under the US Department of Commerce and is tasked with daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and climate monitoring. It is also parent to the National Weather Service.
The agency said its National Centers for Environmental Information would no longer update its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database beyond 2024, and that its information, going as far back as 1980, would be archived.
For decades, it has tracked hundreds of major events across the country, including destructive hurricanes, hail storms, droughts and freezes that have totalled trillions of dollars in damage.
The database uniquely pulls information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's assistance data, insurance organisations, state agencies and more to estimate overall losses from individual disasters.
NOAA Communications Director Kim Doster said in a statement that the change was 'in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.'
Scientists say these weather events are becoming increasingly more frequent, costly and severe with climate change. Experts have attributed the growing intensity of recent debilitating heat, Hurricane Milton, the Southern California wildfires and blasts of cold to climate change.
Assessing the impact of weather events fueled by the planet's warming is key as insurance premiums hike, particularly in communities more prone to flooding, storms and fires. Climate change has wrought havoc on the insurance industry, and homeowners are at risk of skyrocketing rates.
One limitation is that the dataset estimated only the nation's most costly weather events.
The information is generally seen as standardised and unduplicable, given the agency's access to nonpublic data, and other private databases would be more limited in scope and likely not shared as widely for proprietary reasons. Other datasets, however, also track death estimates from these disasters.
Jeff Masters, a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections, pointed to substitutes from insurance brokers and the international disaster database as alternative sources of information.
Still, 'The NOAA database is the gold standard we use to evaluate the costs of extreme weather,' Masters said, 'and it's a major loss, since it comes at a time when we need to better understand how much climate change is increasing disaster losses.'
These moves also don't 'change the fact that these disasters are escalating year over year,' Kristina Dahl, vice president of science at nonprofit climate organisation Climate Central.
'Extreme weather events that cause a lot of damage are one of the primary ways that the public sees that climate change is happening and is affecting people."
'It's critical that we highlight those events when they're happening,' she added. 'All of these changes will make Americans less safe in the face of climate change.'
The move, reported Thursday by CNN, is yet another of President Donald Trump's efforts to remove references to climate change and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the weather from the federal government's lexicon and documents.
Trump has instead prioritised allies in the polluting coal, oil and gas industries, which studies say are linked or traced to climate damage.
The change also marks the administration's latest hit overall to the weather, ocean and fisheries agency.
The Trump administration fired hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal NOAA employees on probationary status in February, part of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency efforts to downsize the federal government workforce. It began a second round of more than 1,000 cuts at the agency in March, more than 10 per cent of its workforce at the time.
At the time, insiders said massive firings and changes to the agency would risk lives and negatively impact the US economy. Experts also noted that fewer vital weather balloon launches under NOAA would worsen US weather forecasts.
More changes to the agency are expected, which could include some of those proposed in the president's preliminary budget.
The agency's weather service also paused providing language translations of its products last month — though it resumed those translations just weeks later.
Türkiye's top court rejected a request on Wednesday to annul a contentious law designed to remove millions of stray dogs from the streets.
Critics said the measure could lead to mass killings of the animals.
The main opposition party had sought the overturn of the legislation that was enacted last year, arguing that it violated animal rights and the right to life.
The Constitutional Court, however, has ruled that the provisions are legally valid and for it to continue to be implemented.
Dozens of animal rights activists had gathered near the Constitutional Court to press the court to repeal the law, holding up posters reading "cancel the blood-ridden law" and shouting anti-government slogans.
The government has estimated that some four million stray dogs roam Türkiye's cities and countryside.
While many of the dogs are harmless, the government moved to tighten legislation on stray animals, following incidents of dog attacks, including cases involving children.
The law requires municipalities to round up stray dogs and relocate them into shelters where they would be vaccinated, neutered and spayed before making them available for adoption.
Dogs that are in pain, terminally ill or pose a health risk to humans would be euthanised.
Animal-lovers strongly oppose the ruling, dubbing it the 'massacre law'. They fear it will lead to widespread culling or dogs ending up in disease-ridden and overcrowded shelters.
They have also raised concerns about how financially-strained municipalities will secure funding to construct the additional shelters.
They fear that, instead of allocating resources to care for the stray dogs, some municipalities may resort to euthanising them under the pretext of illness.
Animal rights advocates have also claimed that many street animals were indiscriminately killed after the passage of the law last August.
The Ankara Bar Association, an organisation for lawyers, claims that since its implementation, "hundreds of animals have died due to this law, which does not serve the public interest."
Last year, the Humane Society International (HSI) criticised Türkiye's approach to managing its stray dog population.
'I think it's really a step back in progressive ways of thinking about healthy cities, progressive cities, managing dogs in a humane way,' said Katherine Polak, the vice president of companion animals and engagement at HSI, as quoted by Vox.
The latest court ruling is likely to increase pressure on municipalities to enforce the law.