NASA said on Monday that it would not host on its website the National Climate Assessments — reports mandated by Congress that detail the ways climate change is affecting every part of the country and how communities can respond.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration took down the webpage, globalchange.gov, that provided the reports, which have been regularly published since 2000. A spokeswoman for NASA said at the time, “All preexisting reports will be hosted on the NASA website, ensuring continuity of reporting.”
But in a reversal on Monday, the same spokeswoman, Bethany Stevens, said that NASA would not host the archived reports.
“The USGCRP met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress,” she said, referring to the United States Global Change Research Program. “NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov’s data.” She added: “To clarify, globalchange.gov is not a NASA domain. We never did and will not host the data.”
As of Monday night, the reports remained available on the documents repository of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the National Weather Service.
The latest assessment, the fifth, came out in 2023. The Trump administration cut funding earlier this year to the Global Change program and dismissed scientists who had volunteered to produce the next climate assessment planned for 2028.
Work on the sixth report had already begun when the Global Change Research Program lost funds. Authors had outlined their chapters, some of which were set to have special emphasis on mitigating climate change and adapting to its effects.
State and local policymakers, researchers and private industry use the reports, and the shuttered website had also been one of the main federal sources of information on climate change.
Legislation mandates that the climate assessments be made available to Congress and to federal agencies.
Two scientific associations, the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, previously announced that they would publish work originally intended for the sixth assessment.
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