How Nonprofits and Educational Institutions Are Rising to Preserve Climate Initiatives in the U.S.
Pamela McElwee, a professor at Rutgers who helped establish the academic coalition, emphasizes the importance of continued US participation 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 targeting will require organizations to make difficult choices about what to save and how to go about it. Furthermore, relying entirely on nonprofits and companies to take over these federal tasks is not sustainable in the long term.
Given the costs of these federal programs, it may prove prohibitive to maintain even a minimum viable version of some essential monitoring systems and research programs. Distributing the responsibility for calculating the nation’s emissions sources and sinks among various organizations raises concerns about scientific standards and data accessibility, according to Cleetus. Additionally, moving away from the records that NOAA, NASA, and other agencies have collected for decades would disrupt the continuity of that data, hindering the ability to detect or project trends.
More fundamentally, publishing national emissions data should be a federal responsibility, particularly for the government of the world’s second-largest climate polluter, Cleetus adds. Neglecting to calculate and share its contributions to climate change sidesteps the nation’s global responsibilities and sends a troubling message to other countries.
Poulter underscores that nonprofits and the private sector can only do so much, for a limited time, to keep these systems operational. “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.”
