When the Federal Emergency Management Agency recently removed the Future Risk Index tool from its website, it not only took away a critical way to quantify the economic impacts of climate changeit also wiped out years of data from multiple federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But before all that data went offline, two software engineers were able to re-create the toolrebuilding it themselves and sharing it on their GitHub free of charge.
The Trump administration has been scrubbing all sorts of information from government websites, from details about U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) work to pages that mention DEI to anything concerning climate change. FEMAs Future Risk Index was another recent casualty of those efforts. The tool, launched in December 2024, mapped the projected economic losses from climate change down to the county level, based on hazards like flooding, drought, heat waves, and wildfires under different emissions scenarios.
In February, the map was quietly removed from the government website. But before that happened, Rajan Desai and Jeremy Herzog, who both work at the consulting firm Fulton Ring, were tipped off that it would likely come down. In preparation, they took screenshots and downloaded the available data so that they could rebuild it themselves. Though theyre not climate expertsDesais background is primarily in data science and Herzogs is in software engineeringDesai says they believed this could be one tangible way to actively fight the destruction thats happening at the federal level right now.
Theyre not alone; online archivists, amateur or otherwise, have been rushing to save data sets, web pages, and tools from government websites amid the Trump administrations attacks. To Desai and Herzog, it was clear that the tool was important, and the result of months of work across agencies. There was basically about a year’s worth of taxpayer-funded resources that were put into this tool, and it’s ultimately for public consumption, Desai says. (FEMA did not return a request for comment about the tool or its removal.)
The Future Risk Index was a supplement to FEMAs National Risk Index, an interactive map that shows which communities are most at risk from various climate hazards. (As of publication, that index is still on FEMAs website). But the Future Risk Index was different in that it included data on the effects of climate change, and how those hazards would become both more frequent and more severe over time.
While the National Risk Index could show expected annual losses from climate hazards over the next few years, for example, the Future Risk Index took that further, all the way to mid-century, when the impacts of climate change will be even more extremewhen the sea level could rise more than 8 feet and global temperatures could be 3 degrees Celsius hotter on average.
[Image: Fulton Ring]
That made the Future Risk Index a crucial tool for people like tribal leaders, local and state elected officials, urban planners, and businesses, because it made the sometimes ambiguous effects of climate change into tangible economic impacts. Looking at Miami-Dade County, for example, the National Risk Index showed that the county could expect annual losses of up to $5.9 million from coastal floodingbut the Future Risk Index showed that by mid-century, even under a lower emissions scenario, those projected annual losses could skyrocket to $29 million. It also showed which hazards (wildfires or floods, for example) would be more or less impactful in a specific area, helping communities prioritize their resources and plan for the future.
An internal FEMA worker first reached out to Desai about saving the tool; swift action was crucial. Though they were able to get a version up on their Github and quickly offer an alternative, Desai and Herzog are realistic about the limitations to this ad hoc way of preserving government projects. They took on the task for free, and plan to keep the tool free, but theyre also a small consulting firm with limited resources (Herzog is the cofounder, while Desai is a data scientist there); they cant do much more to advance the toollike allow it to get more granular than county-level datawithout funds. It’s also now, essentially, frozen: It preserves the data the government already gathered, but theres no ability to update it as things change.
Thats a reality with any individual or small team of archivists doing this work, and theres a threat, they say, that only big companies with vast resources will keep sharing such data and making these useful tools. In an ideal world, the government would be maintaining data sets, Herzog says. But with those coming offline, the only institutions with the actual capabilities to fill the need and take this work further are giant, private companieswhich have already been acquiescing to the Trump administration (like Googles move to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America on its maps).
When Desai and Herzog were reading the documents associated with the climate data they downloaded, they saw clearly that FEMA workers interviewed people from every agency with every data set they collected from NOAA, from NASA, etc., Desai says. The amount of work that was poured into this . . . it would take me months to put together. That speaks to the greater loss of these government resources, and the limitation on the private sector to fill the gaps, attempting to replace the work that was being done by thousands of people who have now been fired. More than 200 FEMA workers have been dismissed since January, and NOAA could soon see more than 1,000 firingsin addition to the more than 800 workers who were already let go.
The documents the pair downloaded from FEMA also didn’t include all the specifics on methodology; some information was even censored. All that institutional knowledge held by FEMA staffers gets lost tooeven as citizens try to rebuild tools and bring information back online.
Even the best efforts that people are doing to archive this data, theres so much information thats lost, Desai says. There’s more information that’s in people’s heads that is just not documented, and we’re never going to know what that information loss looks like.
