How nonprofits and academia are stepping up to salvage US climate programs

Pamela McElwee, a professor at Rutgers who helped establish the academic coalition, says it’s crucial for US scientists to continue participating in the IPCC process.

“It is our flagship global assessment report on the state of climate, and it plays a really important role in influencing country policies,” she says. “To not be part of it makes it much more difficult for US scientists to be at the cutting edge and advance the things we need to do.” 

The AGU also stepped in two months later, after the White House dismissed hundreds of researchers working on the National Climate Assessment, an annual report analyzing the rising dangers of climate change across the country. The AGU and American Meteorological Society together announced plans to publish a “special collection” to sustain the momentum of that effort.

“It’s incumbent on us to ensure our communities, our neighbors, our children are all protected and prepared for the mounting risks of climate change,” said Brandon Jones, president of the AGU, in an earlier statement.

The AGU declined to discuss the status of the project.

Stopgap solution

The sheer number of programs the White House is going after will require organizations to make hard choices about what they attempt to save and how they go about it. Moreover, relying entirely on nonprofits and companies to take over these federal tasks is not viable over the long term. 

Given the costs of these federal programs, it could prove prohibitive to even keep a minimum viable version of some essential monitoring systems and research programs up and running. Dispersing across various organizations the responsibility of calculating the nation’s emissions sources and sinks also creates concerns about the scientific standards applied and the accessibility of that data, Cleetus says. Plus, moving away from the records that NOAA, NASA, and other agencies have collected for decades would break the continuity of that data, undermining the ability to detect or project trends.

More basically, publishing national emissions data should be a federal responsibility, particularly for the government of the world’s second-largest climate polluter, Cleetus adds. Failing to calculate and share its contributions to climate change sidesteps the nation’s global responsibilities and sends a terrible signal to other countries. 

Poulter stresses that nonprofits and the private sector can do only so much, for so long, to keep these systems up and running.

“We don’t want to give the impression that this greenhouse-gas coalition, if it gets off the ground, is a long-term solution,” he says. “But we can’t afford to have gaps in these data sets, so somebody needs to step in and help sustain those measurements.”