Volunteers race to save climate data from Trump's purge

Carey L. Biron, Reuters

When Rebecca Lindsey received a layoff notice from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in February, it felt like an attack on the federal government's online science portal that she had helped run for a decade and a half. The site, called Climate.gov, was a vast repository of research about climate change.

"It was the first blow in what was going to happen to Climate.gov," Lindsey, a former managing editor and program manager for the website, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. By May, the rest of her team had been laid off, and the next month the site itself moved to the NOAA's public relations department, a change from its longstanding autonomy. The NOAA did not respond to a request for comment on its plans for the site.

The Trump administration's unprecedented changes to federal websites — including a halt on data collection and hiding existing data — have put essential climate research at risk, environmentalists say. "It's as if the federal science enterprise has experienced a natural disaster," Lindsey said. In response, volunteers and non-profit groups are racing to preserve data, make it available to the public and provide the tools that permit others to use it.

That includes Lindsey and her small team of unpaid volunteers, who are rebuilding Climate.gov as Climate.us. They restored access this month to the most recent national climate assessment, taken offline in July, as well as content removed under the administration's new policies on diversity and equity. They hope to start publishing new content and updates by the end of the year.

In the first half of this year, the administration made 70% more online changes than during the same period of Trump's first time in office, according to monitoring of select federal websites by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI). Entire federal websites — such as Globalchange.gov, which hosted the country's national climate assessments, and government-run online tools that help map poor communities overburdened by pollution — have been taken down, monitors say. Other sites have been altered to remove material related to diversity, equity or inclusion or to complicate public access. The groups fear policymaking and community input on key regulatory debates will be undermined, as well as the global understanding of climate change, given the US government's traditionally outsized role in the research.

Work to safeguard US environmental data began immediately after Trump's election in November, said Brittany Janis, executive director of the non-profit Open Environmental Data Project. One result was the Public Environmental Data Partners, which brings together a few hundred volunteers and organizations to preserve climate data and re-create tools that have been removed, she said. Members track federal web pages that are being changed, moved or taken down entirely.

Within the first 24 hours of Trump's inauguration, anything having to do with environmental justice had been removed from federal websites, she said. The coalition has prioritized setting these tools back up.

"What surprised us is how fast everything happened. We knew stuff would go down but not how quickly," said Janis, who compared the first few months to a fire drill.

"We have a lot of connections within these agencies, so we'd get the equivalent of whistleblowers saying, 'We know that something is about to happen, we have noticed this is about to go down, you better go and make sure you get that.'"

Engineers and volunteers then navigate to where the public data is published, download databases, get related metadata and then upload that information to servers not owned by the government.

The federal government's focus on climate data appears to have increased in recent months, EDGI said in October, pointing to the removal of the Environmental Protection Agency's Implications of Climate Change and Underlying Science for Climate Change Adaptation pages. EDGI monitors around 5,000 federal web pages.

The changes raise particular concerns for proposed federal regulations now open for public comment, said Izzy Pacenza, EDGI project coordinator.

"The reason we're collecting a lot of this information isn't for people who have a specific skill set. It's for the public ... so the public can weigh in," she said.

Some groups are also stepping up to produce, collate or improve data in the vacuum opened by the federal government.

Over the past decade, the National Equity Atlas has been tracking dozens of indicators, such as income inequality and home ownership, that are drawn from public data that is typically difficult to access or parse.

"We're democratizing access to that data," said Selena Tan, a senior associate with PolicyLink, a research institute that runs the atlas with the University of Southern California. The atlas is now adding four new indicators around environmental justice to track urban tree canopy, lead exposure, risks for toxic flooding and urban heat effects. "We've been in conversation around adding this for years, but it makes it all the more urgent in the current context," Tan said.