AM Best Comments on Decommissioning of NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Climate Disaster Database

AM Best has commented that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) removal of the billion-dollar weather disaster database could impede insurance companies’ ability to track losses due to secondary perils.

The NOAA disasters database, which was created in 1980 to track catastrophes that caused at least $1 billion in economic damage, will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024. This decommissioning comes following a year when there were 27 one-billion-dollar weather events, and 28 in 2023 (despite there being no NOAA-named hurricane), compared with an average of 15 events in 2010-2022. (See the related Best’s Special Report, “US Weather Event Risks Highlight Need for Stress Testing.”) Insured catastrophe losses in 2024 were significant, with two major hurricanes, Helene and Milton, responsible for a large portion of the losses, and severe convective storms also contributing materially. The January wildfires in California continue to challenge reinsurance and insurance markets due to starkly increasing risk profiles, regulations and concentration risk.

Overall, secondary perils, which continue to increase in frequency and severity and are illustrated by the recent tornado outbreak in the Central United States, have become a major cause of loss in the past five years for U.S. property/casualty insurers with property catastrophe exposed lines of business, due predominantly to weather patterns, effects of inflation and exposure growth from population migration. Sridhar Manyem, senior director, Industry Research and Analytics, AM Best, said: “Having a common and agreed-upon data source would help insurers trend these losses in their modeling and use the data for pricing, reinsurance and risk management, as well as help assess the gap between insured losses and economic losses and see how insurance can work to minimize the gap.

“Additionally, if more of these data sources were to disappear, parametric triggers within catastrophe bonds, which depend on measurements by the NOAA, may need to be redesigned. While some other countries have governmental agencies that track similar data, private companies may have to step in to fill the void and it could take some years to build credibility and trust among market participants.”

AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specializing in the insurance industry. Headquartered in the United States, the company does business in over 100 countries with regional offices in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. For more information, visit www.ambest.com.

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