The Data Foundation, the American Geophysical Union, and a coalition of universities are scrambling to ensure that the nation accurately assesses the growing dangers of global warming.
Nonprofits are striving to preserve a US effort to modernize greenhouse-gas measurements, amid growing fears that the Trump administration’s dismantling of federal programs will obscure the nation’s contributions to climate change.
The Data Foundation, a Washington, DC, nonprofit that advocates for open data, is fundraising for an initiative that will coordinate efforts among nonprofits, technical experts, and companies to improve the accuracy and accessibility of climate emissions information. It will build on an effort to improve the collection of emissions data that former president Joe Biden launched in 2023—and which President Trump nullified on his first day in office.
The initiative will help prioritize responses to changes in federal greenhouse-gas monitoring and measurement programs, but the Data Foundation stresses that it will primarily serve a “long-standing need for coordination” of such efforts outside of government agencies.
The new greenhouse-gas coalition is one of a growing number of nonprofit and academic groups that have spun up or shifted focus to keep essential climate monitoring and research efforts going amid the Trump administration’s assault on environmental funding, staffing, and regulations. Those include efforts to ensure that US scientists can continue to contribute to the UN’s major climate report and publish assessments of the rising domestic risks of climate change. Otherwise, the loss of these programs will make it increasingly difficult for communities to understand how more frequent or severe wildfires, droughts, heat waves, and floods will harm them—and how dire the dangers could become.
