The Agriculture Department will restore information about climate change that was scrubbed from its website when President Trump took office, according to court documents filed on Monday in a lawsuit over the deletion.
The deleted data included pages on federal funding and loans, forest conservation and rural clean energy projects. It also included sections of the U.S. Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service sites, and the U.S. Forest Service’s “Climate Risk Viewer,” which included detailed maps showing how climate change might affect national forests and grasslands.
The lawsuit, filed in February, said the purge denied farmers information to make time-sensitive decisions while facing business risks linked to climate change, such as heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires.
The suit was brought by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York along with two environmental organizations, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group.
The plaintiffs had sought a court order requiring the department to restore the deleted pages. On Monday, the government said it would oblige.
Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote to Judge Margaret M. Garnett that he was representing the Agriculture Department in the lawsuit, and that the department had already begun restoring the pages and interactive tools described in the lawsuit. He said the department “expects to substantially complete the restoration process in approximately two weeks.”
Mr. Clayton asked the judge to adjourn a hearing scheduled for May 21. He said the department proposed to submit a report on its progress restoring the data after three weeks, and sought to address “appropriate next steps in this litigation.”
Jeffrey Stein, associate attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law nonprofit that represented the plaintiffs, along with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said, “We’re glad that U.S.D.A. recognized that its blatantly unlawful purge of climate-change-related information is harming farmers and communities across the country.”
Karen Zraick covers legal affairs for the Climate desk and the courtroom clashes playing out over climate and environmental policy.
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