Jeopardized federal climate database shows Mississippi among most vulnerable states to extreme weather
Recently revived database helps states assess risk and plan for future catastrophes
On Oct. 28, 2025, Hurricane Melissa—the fifth most intense Atlantic storm in history—made landfall in Jamaica, causing catastrophic damage and loss of life on its way to Cuba and other island nations that are among the most vulnerable places on earth to climate change disasters.
The scope of the Caribbean disaster will inevitably overwhelm national resources, a scenario the Biden administration hoped to ameliorate when it sought to deliver roughly $3.1 billion in climate adaptation aid to at-risk countries back in 2023.
But as the New York Times reported, President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, rescinded those funds as part of his administration’s broad attacks on related programs and language, many of which were aimed at such at-risk countries.
The administration’s attacks also undermined the ability of U.S. states to cope with the increasingly destructive and costly extreme weather events resulting from climate change. Earlier this year, the Trump administration shelved a federal climate database, eroding access to expert knowledge in ways that could be as crippling as the loss of economic assistance.
The program, known as the Billion-Dollar Disaster Database, was recently revived by a nonprofit organization, and the results reveal the costly toll of America’s worsening weather disasters, particularly in Mississippi, which ranks second in disaster declarations since 2011 and among the highest for economic damage during the last 45 years. The database details the prevalence of extreme weather across the United States, which in Mississippi typically means floods, tornadoes and hurricanes. After relaunching the program, the New Jersey–based nonprofit Climate Central found that the U.S. suffered $101.4 billion in damages from 14 major weather and climate disasters during the first half of 2025, marking the costliest start to any year since records began being kept in 1980. Around $60 billion of the total came from California’s record-breaking wildfires.
The program had long been a mainstay for scientists, policymakers and insurers as a way to prepare for coming disasters and a public record of the rising costs of extreme weather and climate change. When it was abruptly taken offline earlier this year, many researchers warned that the disappearance of such data would obscure the discussion of climate change and make planning more difficult.
“Yanking down the database obfuscates the discussion on natural disasters, and for this to go away and not be part of the dialogue is a big problem,” former NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad said in a May CBS interview. “If you talk to the reinsurance industry and retail, so many sectors rely on this database.”
The return of the database restores a vital tool for measuring how weather disasters are reshaping life across the U.S., with Mississippi at the forefront of those changes.
Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney told The Mississippi Independent in an email that the state Department of Insurance has used the database through re-insurers to evaluate requests for the Mississippi Windstorm Underwriting Association.
“The property and casualty committee of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and the Center for Insurance & Property Research (part of NAIC) worked with this previously,” Chaney noted.
Though Chaney said he was unaware how the use of the data from Climate Central will be used, he added, “We will rely on our sharing of info with MEMA and sister states in trying to maintain affordability. Some of the new court cases will have a bigger impact on affordability in the short term. You can insure predictable risk but cannot insure unpredictable court rulings on punitive damages, such as the Minor vs USAA case.”
In the latter case, now styled United Services Automobile Association v. Estate of Minor, the plaintiffs were awarded more than $10 million in damages after their home insurer (USAA) paid only for damage for wind, excluding damage from storm surge, as a result of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. USAA is expected to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, while the Minors’ lawyer said the previous ruling affirms punitive damages as a warning against “scorched-earth” insurance tactics. If insurance companies are forced to be more lenient because of this case, it could lead to more payouts and fewer FEMA payments.
Mississippi Emergency Management Agency spokesperson Scott Simmons told The Mississippi Independent that agency is not dependent on the database. Instead, MEMA sends its own personnel into the field to confirm damage from natural disasters and compiles data in-house before sending it to federal authorities, when applicable, or when the state applies for a presidential disaster declaration.
Asked if MEMA will incorporate information from the revived database into its current emergency management or long-term resilience planning, such as for updating the State Hazard Mitigation Plan or informing local preparedness strategies, Simmons said, “Not at this time, but we are constantly compiling data and using multiple resources to illustrate comparisons.” He said the gap in data brought on by Trump’s shelving of the database did not affect MEMA’s access to national-scale disaster loss data or its coordination with FEMA and other agencies.
“We are constantly evolving our process of preparing and responding to storms,” Simmons said. “We track and compile our confirmed disaster data, publish it and forward the data to FEMA. I believe this data from our state is used to compile the figures used by the “Billion-Dollar Disaster Database.”
During the past 45 years, Mississippi has experienced 114 major disasters, totaling more than $90 billion in inflation-adjusted damages, according to the revived dataset. A Mississippi Independent analysis of the raw figures found Mississippi ranking third nationally in per-capita disaster losses during that time, behind Louisiana and North Dakota.
Mississippi’s climate vulnerability has again been on display in 2025. In mid-March, 21 counties were struck by severe storms and tornadoes that killed six people, left three missing and injured nearly 30 others. The same system brought flash floods that inundated farmland and small towns across the state. Barely three weeks later, a second wave of storms swept through the region. Between March 29 and April 6, 2025, the National Weather Service issued 550 tornado warnings and 300 flash-flood alerts nationwide. An EF-3 tornado with winds up to 150 miles per hour tore through Slayden, in Marshall County, and another with winds reaching 165 miles per hour struck Senatobia, the latter of which was the strongest recorded in the Mid-South during that outbreak. More than 80 homes were damaged across north Mississippi and six residents were injured. The damage was severe enough that the White House issued a major disaster declaration for the state in May.
Such events are no longer outliers. Nationwide, the average number of billion-dollar disasters has climbed from three per year in the 1980s to 19 annually during the past decade, according to Climate Central’s analysis. Adjusted for inflation, total losses have soared from the tens of billions in the 1990s to more than $180 billion last year, pushing the long-term total above $3 trillion. Some of that growth is due to expanding development in high-risk areas such as floodplains, coastal zones and regions prone to wildfires.
Climate Central scientists say the database is crucial in helping people understand these threats.
“As the frequency and cost of extreme weather events continue to rise, having consistent, comprehensive data is essential for understanding the true toll of climate change,” said Adam Smith, senior climate impacts scientist at Climate Central and a former lead researcher for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which created the database. Smith oversaw the program for 15 years before the Trump administration discontinued it earlier this year and he resigned.
The return of the database coincides with the Trump administration’s most aggressive dismantling yet of environmental safeguards. In his first 100 days back in office, the president has frozen climate spending, withdrawn from the Paris climate accord, and ordered that 25 federal environmental laws expire next year unless renewed. He has reopened coal plants, expanded offshore drilling, and blocked new wind and solar projects, calling wind turbines “ugly” and “disgusting.” His administration has revoked protections for half of the nation’s forests, reopened ocean sanctuaries to commercial fishing, and weakened rules protecting endangered species. In March alone, the Environmental Protection Agency announced 31 regulatory reversals in a single day, including pollution standards once projected to save 200,000 lives.
For states like Mississippi, which depend on federal disaster aid and infrastructure funding to rebuild after storms, those rollbacks could prove costly. Many of the programs being scaled back, including flood-mitigation grants, emissions reductions and coastal resilience funding, have underpinned local recovery efforts for years.
Trump has also drastically limited the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s ability to respond to disasters, primarily by laying off thousands of workers and cutting training and other resilience programs, including flood-mitigation grants, infrastructure upgrades and coastal resilience funding, which have underpinned state preparedness and recovery efforts for years.
Since then, disaster recovery funding has been plagued by long delays and cancellations. For Mississippi, those setbacks have been devastating. The state waited 50 days for disaster aid approval after the March tornado outbreak. Overall, Trump’s approvals have averaged 34 days, a significant increase over his first term and longest since the late 1980s, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Without prompt access to aid, victims of disasters are forced to survive without necessities such as daily living expenses, temporary shelter or home repairs. For example, in the aftermath of the March tornadoes, one man in Walthall County, Mississippi, slept in his car for weeks while awaiting federal aid. The county spent $700,000 to clean up the damage, but halted operations after running out of money.
Some view FEMA as an agency in disarray, yet its apparent mismanagement serves Trump’s long-stated goal of shifting disaster recovery costs to the states.
Mississippi would face greater economic challenges than most states if forced to self-fund disaster recovery, according to an Oct. 20, 2025, analysis by the Pew Research Center, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit think tank. That idea was floated by former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant during a FEMA review council meeting in May. He said the state should use its rainy-day fund instead of federal aid for disaster recovery.
According to Pew’s analysis, Mississippi would struggle under such a scenario. The state’s largest year for disaster aid between 2003 and 2025 totaled $15.9 billion, roughly 25 times its 2024 reserve balance. No other state has received disaster aid exceeding 100 percent of its state reserve. Louisiana’s highest is 30 times the state budget. Similarly, Mississippi’s annual federal disaster assistance averages out to approximately 11 percent of its general fund. No state is more than 3 percent aside from Louisiana at just under 19 percent.
Climate Central says it will continue updating the Billion-Dollar Disaster Database to ensure that the information remains accessible and up to date. The group plans quarterly releases detailing new weather and climate events and the economic and human costs associated with them.
Image: Damage from Hurricane Katrina in Gulfport, Mississippi (via FEMA Photo Library)