Today’s newsletter looks at how the loss of a NOAA disaster database will make it more difficult to track the cost of storm damages going forward as the frequency of natural disasters rises. You can read and share the full version of the story on Bloomberg.com. For unlimited access to climate and energy news, please subscribe. 

NOAA retires a key disaster database

By Lauren Rosenthal and Brian K Sullivan

Extreme weather is an increasingly expensive problem in the US, but going forward, the federal government won’t be keeping track.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, announced Thursday it will “retire” its popular database of climate and weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage, a move that follows the Trump administration’s efforts to scrub environmental data across the federal government.

The free public tool tallies up direct economic losses, response costs and the toll of business interruptions tied to the most damaging disasters to strike the US in near real-time. It’s been a staple for the insurance and reinsurance industries, which otherwise need to invest in their own analysis or rely on costly aggregation services. It also provides emergency managers and elected officials with an ongoing look at how increasingly volatile weather made worse by climate change is colliding with heavy development in disaster-prone areas.

While data stretching back to 1980 will still be archived and available, NOAA staff will no longer update the site or crunch the numbers for any weather-related catastrophes that have occurred since this past December, the agency said. That includes the Los Angeles wildfires, recent flooding in the Midwest and Southeast and a March tornado outbreak that killed at least 39 people across the central and eastern US — all multibillion-dollar events, according to various estimates.

A home destroyed in the Eaton Fire. Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg

NOAA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a message posted on the landing page for the disaster tool, though, it cited “evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes” as reasons for discontinuing the program. The Trump administration has also canceled a handful of NOAA programs and grants that it claims stoke “climate anxiety.” 

Demonstrating the mounting financial impact of climate change is “not necessarily the goal” of the billion-dollar database, said Kieran Bhatia, a hurricane researcher who’s now the North America climate and sustainability leader at Guy Carpenter, a global reinsurance broker.

“I think what has happened is that there’s a lot of other outside evidence that allows people to connect the dots,” Bhatia said. The US has seen an increasing number of billion-dollar weather disasters. Last year saw the second-most events with 27 billion-dollar disasters, following only 2023’s 28 such events, and researchers have worked to tease out the exact influence of climate change.

There are other ways to get damage estimates, including from the insurance and reinsurance industries. They tend to report on big losses in periodic in-depth reports, said Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. But he said those summaries can’t replace NOAA’s database, which was continuously updated with eye-catching maps and customizable charts “that are more accessible and meaningful to the public.” 

That’s valuable to insurers because it gets “the public and public officials to embrace resilience,” said Nutter, who began appealing to the Commerce Department — which oversees NOAA — to protect the billion-dollar disaster program in February. When individuals work to protect their property, that can help “keep insurance premiums down, which is clearly an issue in lots of markets.” 

Read the full story to find out where some of the biggest losses have been and what’s ahead for hurricane season. Subscribe for even more news about shifting climate policies.

Financial fallout 

Hardest hit

USAID cuts curtail Africa clean energy effort

By Laura Millan

The Trump administration’s gutting of the US Agency for International Development, with 80% of its programs now canceled, is a blow for clean cookstove programs in Africa. That means more Africans will have to rely on burning wood or charcoal in their homes, driving air pollution, deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions across the continent.

Clean cookstoves run on electricity, gas or smaller amounts of biomass, and switching households to less polluting cooking methods reduces harmful impacts. Health and environmental advocates for years have promoted clean cooking as an affordable, win-win solution. But the stoppage of US aid has left many projects in limbo.

A demonstrator holds a sign during a "clap out" in support of USAID workers, outside the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC. Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg

“Funding is drying up, and the impact is real,” said Mattias Ohlson, chief executive officer of Emerging Cooking Solutions in Zambia. “These programs can make a difference between a company getting off the ground or not.”

About a third of the global population cooks on open fires or basic stoves, burning charcoal, coal, firewood, agricultural waste or animal dung. The resulting air pollution contributes to 3.7 million premature deaths annually, according to the International Energy Agency. The practice is also responsible for about 2% of global emissions, says the Stockholm Environment Institute. For more, read the full story. 

By Naureen S Malik and Eamon Farhat

Last week, Spain’s power grid failed in mere seconds, blacking out the entire country and parts of Portugal. It was a stunning collapse that illustrates an inviolable law of the electric system: The heartbeat of the grid — known as frequency — must be stable at all times.

With more renewables on the grid and an ever-greater reliance on electricity to power everything from cars to heat pumps, the chances of that heart skipping a beat are rising. That has grid operators racing to find solutions to avoid the next Spain-sized blackout — and they’re increasingly turning to batteries.

In order to maintain the right frequency and stability, the grid needs kinetic energy called inertia, which is typically created by the spinning turbines of thermal plants. Wind turbines and solar panels can’t provide that, so Spain and Portugal need coal, gas or hydro plants connected to the grid.

Other blackouts have raised similar alarms, notably what happened in Texas when a February 2021 cold snap forced gas-fired generators to trip offline. The state, along with California and Utah, has also seen wind, solar and batteries trip during smaller frequency fluctuations, which then caused a bigger frequency dip and cascade into even more outages, including at gas plants. For more, read the full story. 

Pedestrians walk on an unlit street during a power outage in Ourense, Spain after losing power.  Photographer: Brais Lorenzo/Bloomberg

The European Union’s plan to slash the scope of new ESG regulations opens the door to a wave of litigation, as companies would no longer be required to act in a way that lives up to the bloc’s climate law, according to more than 30 legal scholars across the EU and UK. 

The new head of FEMA has a clear message to employees: All decisions go through him. David Richardson told staff in an all-hands meeting he alone will speak for the agency and interpret President Donald Trump’s vision for it, according to employees. Anyone who gets in the way of change will be sidelined, Richardson said.

Canada’s most populous province greenlit a C$20.9 billion ($15 billion) plan to build a new, smaller kind of nuclear plant, a step forward for a nascent technology that’s been touted as a way to meet surging power demand from artificial intelligence.

Zimbabwe has debuted a blockchain-enabled registry that will allow approved project developers to trade the nation’s carbon credits. The step is aimed at making trade in the emission offsets more transparent.

Nissan Motor has abandoned plans to build a battery plant in Fukuoka, Japan, to focus its resources and funding on rescuing itself from a deepening financial crisis.

Australia is in a unique place when it comes to the energy transition. It is the world’s largest exporter of coal and a leading exporter of gas, yet has set a target to have 82% renewable electricity by 2030 and hit net-zero by 2050. The Pacific nation is also caught juggling relations between the US — its military ally — and China — its biggest trading partner — as the two superpowers compete over trade.

It is an unenviable challenge for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has just been voted back into the office with an impressive new majority and also wants Australia to host the COP31 climate summit in 2026.

But the Labor Party’s climate credentials will be put to test very soon, says David Stringer, Bloomberg Green’s Asia managing editor, on this week’s episode of Zero. Listen now, and subscribe on Apple,  Spotify, or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

• Hyperdrive for expert insight into the future of cars
• Energy Daily for a daily guide to the energy and commodities markets that power the global economy
• CityLab Daily for top stories, ideas and solutions, from cities around the world
• Tech In Depth for analysis and scoops about the business of technology

Explore all Bloomberg newsletters.