The Trump administration will end support for a major annual scientific report that documents how climate change is affecting the Arctic, according to two people familiar with the issue.
The move to pull government resources from NOAA’s Arctic Report Card deals a significant blow to efforts to track the health of the Arctic, the region of the planet that has been most heavily affected by rising temperatures from rising greenhouse gases.
The report’s authors were informed of the action during a Monday afternoon meeting, said the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss private details. The move jeopardizes public dissemination of the report that NOAA has published since 2006. It has previously been available on the agency’s website, requires NOAA staff for its production and pools data from NOAA scientists for many of its findings.
Ending the agency support is the latest in a series of steps President Donald Trump has taken to squelch federal climate research. His administration has also sought to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research and gutted the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces a sweeping federal assessment of climate science.
A NOAA spokesperson confirmed the agency would no longer facilitate the report, but that the agency would continue to collect and publish data historically used in it.
“The Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Arctic Research Program will continue to support observations, models and products that contribute to national security, weather prediction, safety of navigation, and the economic vitality of coastal communities,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
NOAA’s backing is essential for the report, which relies on 100 scientists from across the world to compile data and observations across the Arctic, said Zack Labe, a climate scientist at research organization Climate Central and an author of the report card’s sea surface temperature chapter.
“[I]t has been the key reference for understanding our changing Arctic for the last two decades,” he wrote in a text message. “Without its support, we lose the crucial insights on this rapidly warming part of the world, along with documenting all of the local and far-reaching impacts it has on society and the environment.”
The Arctic Report Card is typically one of the major news events at the annual conference for the American Geophysical Union, an organization of Earth and space scientists. Previous reports have documented some daunting discoveries about the effect climate change has had on the Arctic, including how perturbations in the northern latitudes ripple across the planet. Those include issues ranging from the effect of melting ice on global sea-level rise to recent findings that the Arctic for the first time became a global contributor to climate change due to rapidly thawing, carbon-rich permafrost.
“Devastating news for Arctic environmental monitoring,” Rick Thoman, one of the report’s lead editors and a climate specialist at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks’ Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness and International Arctic Research Center, posted on Bluesky.
While the Trump administration allowed the Arctic Report Card to proceed last year, it did not issue notice of its release. It is unclear how nonfederal contributors to the report will continue work on the upcoming edition, which has already begun, or where it will be posted.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
