The Trump administration’s decision to end National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s billion-dollar disaster database is drawing sharp concern from insurers who depend on federal climate data to model catastrophic risks - especially as the industry faces mounting wildfire and weather losses.
Brian Espie, chief underwriting officer at Kettle, said the database shutdown will increase the cost and complexity of underwriting across the sector.
“Kettle was built up around a proprietary wildfire model, and much of our data sources are from public, government-supported entities,” he said. “NOAA is the largest supplier of it.”
The now-retired database has allowed researchers, insurers and the public to track the escalating toll of extreme weather events. According to NOAA, the US sustained 403 weather and climate disasters from 1980 through 2024 where total damages exceeded $1 billion each, amounting to a cumulative cost of more than $2.915 trillion.
But the program is the latest casualty of deep staffing and budget cuts at the federal agency, and it comes amid wider efforts by the Trump administration to roll back climate-related programming.
For underwriters, the loss of NOAA’s centralized resource leaves a critical data gap. “This isn’t just a Kettle thing,” Espie said. “You’ve seen a lot of the technologies in the market just surface publicly available data, and NOAA has been a core provider.”
Without it, insurers are turning to private vendors—many of whom are launching satellite networks and proprietary tools to fill the vacuum. But Espie warned that shift will come at a cost: “If [insurers] are able to obtain the same data, it’s going to come from private sources who naturally are going to charge more for it.”
He added that Kettle has spent the past several months building redundancies, anticipating NOAA’s move. “It requires us going to more sources, paying more for that data, and then putting more internal investment into pulling and aggregating that data together,” he said.
While investors in private climate data firms may benefit, the broader impact will be felt by policyholders. “Anytime you increase costs for insurers, those costs get borne out by the policyholders,” he said. “Over time, that is going to make insurance more expensive for homeowners and business owners.”
