Given the “dramatic changes” brought about by this administration, “the future will not be the past,” she says. “This is like a natural disaster. We can’t think about rebuilding in the way that things have been in the past. We have to look ahead and say, ‘What is needed? What can people afford?’”
Organizations can also use this moment to test and develop emerging technologies that could improve greenhouse-gas measurements, including novel sensors or artificial intelligence tools, Hayes says.
“We are at a time when we have these new tools, new technologies for measurement, measuring, and monitoring,” he says. “To some extent it’s a new era anyway, so it’s a great time to do some pilot testing here and to demonstrate how we can create new data sets in the climate area.”
Saving scientific contributions
It’s not just the collection of emissions data that nonprofits and academic groups are hoping to save. Notably, the American Geophysical Union and its partners have taken on two additional climate responsibilities that traditionally fell to the federal government.
The US State Department’s Office of Global Change historically coordinated the nation’s contributions to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s major reports on climate risks, soliciting and nominating US scientists to help write, oversee, or edit sections of the assessments. The US Global Change Research Program, an interagency group that ran much of the process, also covered the cost of trips to a series of in-person meetings with international collaborators.
But the US government seems to have relinquished any involvement as the IPCC kicks off the process for the Seventh Assessment Report. In late February, the administration blocked federal scientists including NASA’s Katherine Calvin, who was previously selected as a cochair for one of the working groups, from attending an early planning meeting in China. (Calvin was the agency’s chief scientist at the time but was no longer serving in that role as of April, according to NASA’s website.)
The agency didn’t respond to inquiries from interested scientists after the UN panel issued a call for nominations in March, and it failed to present a list of nominations by the deadline in April, scientists involved in the process say. The Trump administration also canceled funding for the Global Change Research Program and, earlier this month, fired the last remaining staffers working at the Office of Global Change.
In response, 10 universities came together in March to form the US Academic Alliance for the IPCC, in partnership with the AGU, to request and evalute applications from US researchers. The universities—which include Yale, Princeton, and the University of California, San Diego—together nominated nearly 300 scientists, some of whom the IPCC has since officially selected. The AGU is now conducting a fundraising campaign to help pay for travel expenses.