For insurance professionals, NOAA’s forecasts, hazard maps, and historical data-sets have been essential for:

Predicting natural disasters: NOAA’s hurricane and storm surge models help assess property exposure in coastal regions.
Understanding long-term trends: Historical data on rainfall, drought, and temperature extremes inform underwriting and risk pricing.
Supporting flood risk analysis: NOAA contributes to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and provides tools like floodplain maps and precipitation frequency estimates.
Delivering early warnings: Real-time alerts and severe weather forecasts help businesses prepare for and mitigate losses.

With budget cuts affecting research labs, satellite programs, and data dissemination systems, access to these resources may become limited or delayed. Specifically, data-sets such as sea surface temperature anomalies, hurricane track forecasts, precipitation intensity models, and long-term climate projections may be disrupted. These are critical for evaluating exposure to risks like coastal flooding, heat stress, and wildfire spread, especially in high-risk regions like California, Florida and other states along the East Coast.

What we need now...

Reliable, forward-looking climate risk insights: Companies need to understand how physical climate risk — like flooding, heatwaves, wildfires and storm surge — could impact operations, supply chains, and infrastructure over the next 5, 10, or 30 years. For example, an event on the scale of Hurricane Katrina today would generate nearly $100 billion in insured losses. Having the proper policies in place, informed by advanced climate insights, will help minimize losses.
Regulatory readiness: Disclosure requirements under frameworks like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), and SEC climate rules are expanding. Transparent, auditable climate risk reporting is becoming a baseline expectation.
Investment-grade risk visibility: Investors are increasingly focused on the longterm resilience of their portfolios. They need confidence that capital deployed today will remain viable and productive in a changing climate — making companies that invest in resilience more attractive to investors.

How insurance pros should respond...

Conduct site-specific climate risk assessments that incorporate various climate change scenario models and consider temperature, water, wind, and soil-related risks. Focus areas vary by region, such as droughts and wildfires in California, and storms and floods in Florida.

Special Reports /

NOAA budget cuts: What insurance professionals need to know now

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