The government website that hosted the federal government’s national climate reports, which are mandated by legislation, went offline Monday afternoon. The website was also one of the main federal sources of information on climate change.
Since 2000, the federal government has regularly published comprehensive reports on how greenhouse gas emissions are changing climate and affecting human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy.
The five published reports had been available at globalchange.gov, but that address stopped working Monday afternoon. It now displays a “this site can’t be reached” error message.
The Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires an assessment of climate change to be provided to the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies every four years. Previous National Climate Assessments remain available on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s online documents archive. They will also be on NASA’s website, said Bethany Stevens, a NASA press secretary. The White House did not respond to a request for a comment.
In early April, the Trump administration cut funding for future editions of the reports, and later that month, the authors for the next assessment were dismissed. Work on the sixth assessment, scheduled to come out in early 2028, had already begun when the funds and support were cut.
The last climate assessment, which came out in 2023, is used by state and local governments, as well as private companies, to help prepare for the effects of climate-related events like heat waves, floods and droughts.
“It helped communities understand and prepare for climate change,” said Costa Samaras, an environmental engineer at Carnegie Mellon University and a former Biden administration adviser who was leading the chapter on mitigation in the next assessment.
In addition to hosting the National Climate Assessments, the website was one of the primary federal sources of information on climate change, reflecting the program’s broad mission to improve our understanding of global change.
Removing funding for the Global Change program was one part of the Trump administration’s reduction of climate research and information. Funding for other major federal science agencies and programs that research climate change, including the National Science Foundation, NOAA and NASA, has also been reduced.
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