Scientists are exploring ways to keep alive the nation’s top climate report following the Trump administration’s decision Monday to remove archived versions of the National Climate Assessment from the internet — along with the entire website for the government body that produces them.
The previous reports likely will live on in some digital form — at least eventually. What’s happens to the next installment is another question.
A White House spokesperson told POLITICO’s E&E News that all five preexisting NCAs eventually would be housed on NASA’s website. NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said the agency is “currently pursuing a technical pathway” to host the reports, but it’s still a work in progress.
That means it’s unclear whether digital elements from the previous reports — such as an interactive atlas presenting visual data from the last assessment in 2023 — would make it to the new webpages. Some scientists worry, too, that the reports may be reduced to pdfs linked on some hard-to-find corner of the web.
At the same time, scientists are concerned about what the next NCA will look like — if it’s published at all. The sixth version was originally scheduled for release in 2028, but the Trump administration in April dismissed all the scientists working on it.
The report is required by Congress, so canceling the NCA altogether would open the Trump administration to legal challenges. But the White House has kept mum about its next steps. And some experts worry the next iteration could contain dramatically watered-down research — or even blatant misinformation.
As a result, some researchers are now thinking about nonfederal options for U.S. climate science reports.
They have big shoes to fill.
The congressionally mandated report, published every few years by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is the country’s most comprehensive climate assessment. It contains input from hundreds of contributors specializing in fields ranging from extreme weather to urban planning to public health.
It’s unlikely scientists could produce a nongovernment version that fully lives up to the previous federal reports, experts say.
But some groups are trying anyway. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American Meteorological Society (AMS), who together support dozens of scientific journals on climate-focused topics, already have teamed up on an initiative they’ve billed as a “first-of-its-kind special collection focused on climate change in the United States.”
It’s unclear exactly what the collection will look like, or how submissions will be judged and selected. But organizers say the project would fill some of the gaps left by the uncertainties surrounding the NCA.
“This collaboration provides a critical pathway for a wide range of researchers to come together and provide the science needed to support the global enterprise pursuing solutions to climate change,” said AGU President Brandon Jones in a statement.
Still, the project won’t boast the same heft as the federal reports, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and an author on multiple previous NCAs.
The effort is “incredibly useful and much-needed and a phenomenal support for the climate impact community,” she said. Climate scientists publish their studies across a range of academic journals, and the AGU/AMS initiative would bring together some of the country’s top research.
But Hayhoe added “it just isn’t possible to replace the second most thoroughly reviewed climate document in the world — after the IPCC [the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] — with a special journal issue.”
Scientists volunteer time for the NCA, but divvying up chapters and assignments requires a monumental coordinated effort. And the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine typically conducts a review of the finished NCA draft, which Hayhoe said is “extremely expensive and exhaustive.”
Then there’s the production side, which includes translations, graphics and interactive elements — plus outreach and promotions to communicate the findings to the public.
Even if some organizations could marshal the resources to make it possible, Hayhoe noted, the report would not fulfill the congressional mandate for a federal climate report. And it probably wouldn’t be used for federal decision-making — one of the primary purposes of the NCA.
Scientists have rallied together before
Still, such an effort wouldn’t be unprecedented.
Two decades ago, there was a long gap between the first and second NCA reports. The first report was published in 2000, and by 2006, the next installment still had not materialized. Environmental groups eventually sued the George W. Bush administration for failing to produce the report, and the second installment was finally published in 2009.
In the interim, independent researchers — led by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ecological Society of America — stepped up to produce a series of regional climate assessments. The reports focused on areas including the Great Lakes region, California and the Northeast.
More recently, dozens of scientists across the country have volunteered their time to independently complete the first National Nature Assessment, a federal report ordered in 2022 by the Biden administration and canceled this year by President Donald Trump. Unwilling to give up on the project, the researchers established a new organization called United by Nature to coordinate their efforts, and they aim to release the report in July 2026.
The NNA requires fewer resources than a typical NCA, Hayhoe noted. But it’s still an example of scientists coming together from across the country to continue an effort without the federal support they’d originally counted on.
“It was too important not to continue, and so we were gonna find a way to do it,” said Phil Levin, formerly the director of the federal National Nature Assessment and now director of United by Nature. “I didn’t really make a choice — I just kept going.”
