NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster list provides a crucial metric for tracking rising damages tied to climate change and development.

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Takeaway:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is retiring its database of climate and weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage, which has been a valuable tool for the insurance and reinsurance industries.

The database, which has been tracking disasters since 1980, will no longer be updated, and NOAA staff will not crunch numbers for weather-related catastrophes that have occurred since December.

The move follows the Trump administration’s efforts to scrub environmental data across the federal government, and critics argue that it will make it harder to track the financial impact of climate change and prepare for future disasters.