By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
As we experience a summer of extreme heat, intense storms, and multiple seasons every ten days, even climate deniers are having second thoughts about the reality of our warming planet. My view on mitigating climate change is that the transition to renewable energy is well underway, but the speed and complexity of the transition mean we will continue to experience at least another generation of global warming. Other sources of greenhouse gases, such as the manufacturing of concrete and methane releases from landfills, present additional challenges. The Trump administration's impact on energy is slowing decarbonization in the United States, but the economics of renewable energy will continue to ensure that this transition will not be stopped. In the meantime, we need to adapt to our warming planet and enhance our capacity to build resilient human settlements and effective disaster response and reconstruction.
The Trump Administration’s approach to disasters has been to pretend they are not getting worse. It even includes an effort to stop reporting to the public on disasters costing more than 1 billion dollars to address. According to the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
“In alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) will no longer be updating the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product.”
The agency data from 1980 to 2024 is still on NOAA’s website, and it demonstrates the growing number of major disaster events. According to NOAA:
“From 1980-2024, there were 403 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect United States. These events included 32 drought events, 45 flooding events, 9 freeze events, 203 severe storm events, 67 tropical cyclone events, 23 wildfire events, and 24 winter storm events. The 1980–2024 annual average is 9.0 events (CPI-adjusted); the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2020–2024) is 23.0 events (CPI-adjusted).”
The now-dormant NOAA site provides a clear picture of our growing disaster problem. It indicates that the years 2010-2019 saw 131 billion-dollar disasters with a financial impact of $995 billion, and the last years of data from 2020 through 2024 counted 115 events with an impact of $747 billion. NOAA’s disaster average count from 1980–2024 was 9 events and $64.8 billion per year, but in 2020–2024 the U.S. averaged 23 disasters and $149.3 billion in impact per year. In 2024 alone, NOAA tracked 27 events costing $182.7 billion. As for 2025 and so far in 2026, I guess the Administration figures that what we don’t know can’t hurt us.
While our federal government is trying to hide its head in the sand, the rest of us are more interested in understanding reality to cope with it. Fortunately, the non-profit Climate Central has taken over NOAA’s work of keeping track of big disasters. While 2025 was slightly less bad than 2024, we won’t know what 2026 will look like until the end of this year. According to Climate Central:
“The past three years rank highest for the annual number of billion-dollar disasters: 2023 (28 events), 2024 (27 events), and 2025 (23 events)… The number of billion-dollar severe storms set a new record in 2025, with 21 such events. This reflects near-record numbers of damaging high wind and tornado reports during the spring and summer of 2025… A billion-dollar drought affected the western U.S. in 2025. This event was primarily driven by heat, rather than by a lack of precipitation. This is consistent with an emerging trend of heat-driven drought in the western U.S. The catastrophic flash flooding in the Texas Hill Country in July 2025 was one of the deadliest inland floods in U.S. history. This event did not result in losses of at least $1 billion, underscoring that the full toll of extreme weather events isn’t reflected in dollar-value losses alone.”
In addition to Climate Central’s work, AccuWeather produces “total damage and economic loss” estimates. These estimates are much larger than the more conservative direct-loss data produced by NOAA and Climate Central because they also include indirect impacts such as business interruption, job and wage losses, supply-chain effects, health impacts, and other costs that provide a comprehensive estimate of the total costs of weather disasters. AccuWeather estimated seven major U.S. weather disasters in 2025 at $378 billion to $424 billion in total damage and economic loss, and it estimated the January 2026 winter storm at a little more than $100 billion.
While the scale of climate-accelerated disasters increases, the Trump Administration is working overtime to shed responsibility for disaster response and trying to push the cost of response and reconstruction away from the federal government. Moreover, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been losing staff steadily, and politicization of emergency response has slowed the already glacial pace of reimbursement for state, local, and private emergency response. Under Trump, “red state” disaster funding is released faster than funding in “blue states.” FEMA has about 21,000 staff today, down from about 25,800 when the Trump team took over from the Biden Administration. The administration has signaled its strong desire to end its direct role in disaster response. This past May, the President’s FEMA Review Council recommended a number of changes to the current deeply problematic system. Some of the changes are designed to reduce bureaucratic delays, but in the guise of greater efficiency, many of the changes are accompanied by proposed reductions in federal funding. In a web piece on the National Association of Counties website this past May, Brett Mattson observed that:
“County governments are on the front lines of every disaster. From debris removal and shelter operations to rebuilding public infrastructure and administering recovery grants, counties bear enormous responsibility before, during and after declared disasters. The current FEMA system – while essential – has long drawn criticism from county officials for bureaucratic delays, complex grant requirements, slow reimbursements and a structure that can slow rather than accelerate local recovery. The FEMA Review Council was established by Executive Order 14180 in January 2025 to conduct a full-scale review of the agency and recommend reforms.” [In summarizing the Council’s recommendations Mattson concludes that report calls for:] “Transforming and renaming FEMA into a leaner agency with a reduced headquarters footprint and a formal role as "payer of last resort," meaning other federal programs must be exhausted before FEMA steps in…If implemented, these reforms would represent a significant transfer of responsibility – and cost – to the state and local level. Counties should expect less federal on-the-ground presence in most disasters, higher thresholds to qualify for federal assistance and greater expectations around local capability and resource management. The report does preserve critical federal capabilities counties rely on, including Urban Search and Rescue task forces, the National Disaster Medical System and IPAWS, and recommends retaining the Emergency Management Performance Grant with a potential one-time funding increase to help support the transition. Smaller, rural and under-resourced counties face the greatest risk if state governments do not adequately fill the gaps created by a reduced federal role.”
The problem with this approach is that it is a poorly thought-through and ideologically driven division of responsibility. Not every locality deals with a disaster every year, so sharing disaster response and reconstruction capacity across jurisdictions reduces unnecessary duplication of effort. Moreover, costs shared nationally means that communities fortunate enough to avoid a disaster may pay into a central fund, but when their turn at disaster finally arrives, they do not need to pay the full cost of dealing with what are defined as shared national costs.
I am not arguing that the pre-Trump version of FEMA was terrific. After Hurricane Sandy, my Long Beach neighbors and I experienced the horrific bureaucracy of government emergency response. Those of us with savings could pay for reconstruction while fighting for reimbursement. But for many, reconstruction was delayed for many months and even years while waiting for insurance companies and the government to provide the funds to rebuild. Back in the early days of the disaster, first response was impressive, and neighbors helped neighbors to get through the worst impacts. Then, in the weeks and months that followed, we needed a more aggressive and competent response from government. What we are likely to see now will be an underfunded ad hoc system of disaster response and post-disaster reconstruction. The changes proposed by the Trump Administration must be approved by Congress, but the folks in charge these days seem to act regardless of legislative intent, and our legislative branch no longer thinks its job is to check executive power. I expect we will see further deterioration of federal emergency response capacity.
One of the reasons that disasters have become more expensive is that our development patterns have brought our homes closer to vulnerable areas that once were largely unsettled. Lands near water and forests are far more developed than before. We also require more extensive infrastructure for energy, water, sewage treatment, and transportation. All those factors increase the cost of disasters. But the other reason is that the changing climate has made extreme weather events more common and more intense. Every night, the evening news starts with the latest weather disaster underway in one part of the nation or the other.
America’s approach to disaster response and reconstruction is a disaster. Things have literally gone from bad to worse. At a time when we need to get better at mitigating, responding, and recovering from disasters, our federal government has somehow managed to get worse at it. We will be spending more on disaster response in the future, and in localities without the resources to replace federal funding and capacity, disaster response will decline.
Moreover, as disasters become more common, we confront a growing need for a more systematic and routinized approach to response, recovery, and reconstruction. This is a recurring theme of mine, as I wrote back in October of 2024:
“I’ve written many times about our need to develop a systematic, fully funded approach to post-disaster reconstruction (see The Disaster of Disaster Reconstruction, Climate-Fueled Extreme Weather: Protection, Recovery, and Reconstruction, and Adapting to our Warming Planet Despite our Dysfunctional Congress). The current insurance system is not designed to deal with the risks of climate change…A climate-resilient built environment will be expensive, but so will rebuilding when even our strongest structures fail. Once again, I maintain that the funds needed for resilience and reconstruction need to come from a dedicated trust fund, built on progressive increases to our income taxes. It will cost everyone money, but by spending it as an investment and with predictability, the long-run cost will be lower than the current ad hoc, emergency response approach. The fundamental, irreducible job of government is to protect the population from harm. This requires a strong military and capable domestic first responders. It also requires more resilient buildings, transportation, energy, water, sewage, and communication infrastructure. This must be paid for upfront, and when it fails, reconstruction payments should be automatic and by right. It is time to rethink our approach to building and reconstructing our communities. How many more catastrophes will it take before we get the message that the current approach is failing?”
Survey data indicates that when people directly experience the impact of extreme weather events, regardless of political affiliation, they shed their doubts about the reality of climate change. It is shameful that we need to learn these lessons the hard way, and that we require catastrophe to combat disinformation. One way or the other, reality reasserts itself, and eventually that will impact America’s disastrous approach to disasters.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
