Latest news with #PublicEnvironmentalDataPartners
The Guardian
21-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The Trump administration is sabotaging your scientific data
United States science has propelled the country into its current position as a powerhouse of biomedical advancements, technological innovation and scientific research. The data US government agencies produce is a crown jewel – it helps us track how the climate is changing, visualize air pollution in our communities, identify challenges to our health and provide a panoply of other essential uses. Climate change, pandemics and novel risks are coming for all of us – whether we bury our heads in the sand or not – and government data is critical to our understanding of the risks these challenges bring and how to address them. Many of thesedata remains out of sight to those who don't use them, even though they benefit us all. Over the past few months, the Trump administration has brazenly attacked our scientific establishment through agency firings censorship and funding cuts, and it has explicitly targeted data the American taxpayers have paid for. They're stealing from us and putting our health and wellbeing in danger – so now we must advocate for these federal resources. That's why we at the Public Environmental Data Partners are working to preserve critical environmental data. We are a coalition of non-profits, academic institutions, researchers and volunteers who work with federal data to support policy, research, advocacy and litigation work. We are one node in an expansive web of organizations fighting for the data American taxpayers have funded and that benefits us all. The first phase of our work has been to identify environmental justice tools and datasets at risk through conversations with environmental justice groups, current and former employees in local, state, and federal climate and environment offices, and researchers. To date, we have saved over a hundred priority datasets and have reproduced six tools. We're not fighting for data for data's sake; we're fighting for data because it helps us make sense of the world. The utility of many of these datasets and tools comes from the fact that they are routinely updated. While our efforts ensure that we have snapshots of these critical data sources and tools, it will be a huge loss if these cease to be updated entirely. That's why we are 'life rafting' tools outside of government – standing up copies of them on publicly accessible, non-government pages – hoping that we can return them to a future administration that cares about human and environmental health and does not view science as a threat. The second phase is to develop these tools, advocate for better data infrastructure, and increase public engagement. There's a question of scope – if the government stops sharing National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration data, we don't have the resources to start monitoring and tracking hurricanes. For many of these critical data sources, the government is the only entity with the resources to collect and publish this data – think about the thousands of weather stations set up around the world or the global air pollution monitors or the spray of satellites orbiting the earth. On the other hand, we do have the expertise to build environmental justice tools that better serve the communities that have borne the brunt of environmental injustice, by co-creating with those communities and by building from what we have saved from the government – like the Council on Environmental Quality's CEJST, the Environmental Protection Agency's EJScreen, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Social Vulnerability and Environmental Justice tools. A common refrain of the saboteurs is that if these functions that they are targeting are important enough, the states or the private sector will step in to fill the gap. While some of these functions of the federal government are replicable outside of government, privatization will render them less accessible, more expensive and subject to the whims of the markets. The states can also step in and fill some gaps – but many of the biggest challenges that we're facing are best tackled by a strong federal government. Furthermore, many states are happily joining this anti-science crusade. The climate crisis and pandemics don't stop politely at state borders. If data collection is left up to the states, the next pandemic will not leave a state untouched because it dismantled its public health department – but such actions will leave a gaping hole in our understanding of the risks to the residents of that state and its neighbors. What's more, some states do not have the resources to stand up the infrastructure required to shoulder the burden of data collection. Coordination between federal and state governments is essential. Data is being stolen from us; our ability to understand the world is being stolen from us. Americans will die because the Trump administration is abdicating its responsibility to the people – this censorship regime will have dire consequences. That's why we must stand up for science, we must be loud about the importance of federal data and we must put the brakes on Trump's un-American agenda. Jonathan Gilmour is a data scientist at Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health, a fellow at the Aspen Policy Academy, and coordinator at the Public Environmental Data Partners.
Japan Times
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Japan Times
Volunteers on 'right side of history' fight Trump data purge
In defiance of an executive order that wiped reams of data from U.S. government websites, volunteers are reversing the "act of official vandalism" and ensuring open access to censored climate, LGBTQ+ and health stats. Scores of activists are working to safeguard and then make public data they had archived for safe-keeping after President Donald Trump's administration targeted "gender ideology extremism" and environmental policies with deletion. "We're moving past the initial phase and approaching the next: ensuring that there's public access to everything that we have preserved," data scientist Jonathan Gilmour said via video call. Gilmour belongs to Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of environmental, justice and policy organizations committed to "public access to federal environmental data". They are working with other volunteers — environmental coders at Earth Hacks, archivists such as the Internet Archive, data consultants Fulton Ring — to build new public access tools from the purged data. The Trump administration has gutted several federal agencies, fired tens of thousands of employees and altered or deleted thousands of government webpages since taking office in January. First in Trump's firing line were health, climate and LGBTQ+ datasets that fell foul of his ideology. These include stats gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as the social vulnerability index and environmental justice index — measures used to quantify the health risks faced by different Americans. Among those working to restore the deleted data are former government workers and staff who were put on leave by Trump. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employee placed on leave helped make a new map that shows improvements in air pollution monitoring systems and upgrades of aging sewer systems made under environmental justice grants. "It's miraculous what (we've) been able to do — take these tools ... and protect them from this act of official vandalism," the employee, who requested anonymity to speak more freely, said. Those who are leading efforts to restore access to the missing data say they are understaffed, underfunded and persisting in their work despite risking retaliation from the Trump government, which has targeted lawyers it considered hostile. "There's certainly a concern of retribution from the administration, but we feel strongly we're on the right side of history here," Gilmour said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment before time of publication. Data for all Rajan Desai and Jeremy Herzog, founders of Fulton Ring, were motivated to volunteer by reports of government censorship. "This is like (George Orwell's dystopian novel) '1984.' It made it very real for us," Desai said in a video call from New York. The duo built a new version of the government's Future Risk Index, showing the cost of climate change to U.S. communities. The administration removed the original, managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in January. FEMA did not respond to a request for comment before time of publication. The new version resurrects the dead data — and also processes it faster and better on smartphones, even fixing some of its old bugs. The aim is to arm ordinary Americans with the sort of valuable information that is currently held in private hands. "A lot of this disaster data, flooding data (is used by) insurance and financial institutions in some capacity. The only person that seems not to have any visibility into this is the average consumer who might use it to buy a house," Desai said. He hopes that by turning these obscure datasets into new and open tools, citizens can make more informed decisions. Preserving data Getting the data back online is only the first step. It must then be protected from further takedowns, Gilmour said. The coalition is backing up its tools over an array of platforms, including the research site Figshare, Canadian repository Borealis and Harvard University's Dataverse, an indefinite storage network across 216 locations over 36 countries. A diverse network bolsters protection against a government that might aim to restrict information within its borders. The repository hosts data from research institutes, academics and more, ranging from small Excel spreadsheets to astronomical or biomedical data that can be thousands of terabytes bigger, such as a file that can fill four iPhone 16 Pro smartphones. Another challenge is keeping the records up to date since stagnant data loses relevance every day. "(Gathering new data) is incredibly labor-intensive when you don't have the power of an agency or the resources of the U.S. government to request data from the states," Gilmour said. His volunteer network is fundraising to pay workers, but they know some information will be lost. There are "tools that include geospatial data from NASA satellites. If NASA stops providing that information, we're not going to go launch our own satellites," Gilmour said. Work in progress or internal tools that were not public-facing could be irretrievable if the Trump administration defies federal laws on record retention, the EPA employee said. An EPA spokesperson said that it was working to implement Trump's executive orders. "President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship in his first term, and the EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment in his second term," the spokesperson said via email. Despite the challenges, Gilmour said the volunteers would keep at their mission to save the people's data. "We're preserving these tools and datasets that have been paid for by the American people and developed for all of us."
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Government Science Data May Soon Be Hidden. They're Racing to Copy It.
Amid the torrent of executive orders signed by President Trump were directives that affect the language on government web pages and the public's access to government data touching on climate change, the environment, energy and public health. In the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites, and more are feared to be at risk of deletion. While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed. But now, hundreds of volunteers are working to collect and download as much government data as possible and to recreate the digital tools that allow the public to access that information. So far, volunteers working on a project called Public Environmental Data Partners have retrieved more than 100 data sets that were removed from government sites, and they have a growing list of 300 more they hope to preserve. It echoes efforts that began in 2017, during Mr. Trump's first term, when volunteers downloaded as much climate, environmental, energy and public health data as possible because they feared its fate under a president who has called climate change a hoax. Little federal information disappeared then. But this time is different. And so, too, is the response. 'We should not be in this position where the Trump administration can literally take down every government website if it wants to,' said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental scientist who helped found the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative in 2017 to conserve federal data. 'We're not prepared for having resilient public information in the digital age and we need to be.' While a lot of data generated by agencies, like climate measurements collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is required by Congress, the digital tools that allow the public to view that data are not. 'This is a campaign to remove public access,' said Jessie Mahr, the director of technology at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, a member group of the data partnership. 'And at the end of the day, American taxpayers paid for these tools.' Farmers have sued the United States Department of Agriculture for deleting climate data tools they hope will reappear. In February, a successful lawsuit led to the re-publication of the Centers for Disease Control's Social Vulnerability Index. A banner at the top of the C.D.C. webpage now notes that the Department of Health and Human Services was required to restore the site by court order. The Public Environmental Data Partners coalition has received frequent requests for two data tools: the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, or CEJST, and the Environmental Justice Screening Tool, or EJScreen. The first was developed under a Biden administration initiative to make sure that 40 percent of federal climate and infrastructure investments to go to disadvantaged communities. It was taken offline in January. EJScreen, developed under the Obama administration and once available through the E.P.A, was removed in early February. 'The very first thing across the executive branch was to remove references to equity and environmental justice and to remove equity tools from all agencies,' Dr. Gehrke said. 'It really impairs the public's ability to demonstrate structural racism and its disproportionate impacts on communities of color.' Just a dozen years ago, the E.P.A. defined environmental justice as 'the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income.' The E.P.A.'s new administrator, Lee Zeldin, recently equated environmental justice to 'forced discrimination.' Nonprofit organizations used both screening tools to apply for federal grants related to environmental justice and climate change. But the E.P.A. closed all of its environmental justice offices last week, ending three decades of work to mitigate the effects on poor and minority communities often disproportionately burdened by industrial pollution. It also canceled hundreds of grants already promised to nonprofit groups trying to improve conditions in those communities. 'You can't possibly solve a problem until you can articulate it, so it was an important source of data for articulating the problem,' said Harriet Festing, executive director of the nonprofit group Anthropocene Alliance. Christina Gosnell, co-founder and president of Catalyst Cooperative, a member of the environmental data cooperative, said her main concern was not that the data won't be archived before it disappears, but that it won't be updated. Preserving the current data sets is the first step, but they could become irrelevant if data collection stops, she said. More than 100 tribal nations, cities, and nonprofits used CEJST to show where and why their communities needed trees, which can reduce urban heat, and then applied for funds from the Arbor Day Foundation, a nonprofit organization that received a $75 million grant from the Inflation Reduction Action. The Arbor Day Foundation was on track to plant over a quarter of a million new trees before its grant was terminated in February. How hard it is to reproduce complex tools depends on how the data was created and maintained. CEJST was 'open source,' meaning the raw data and information that backed it up were already publicly accessible for coders and researchers. It was put back together by three people within 24 hours, according to Ms. Mahr. But EJScreen was not an open source tool, and recreating it was more complicated. 'We put a lot of pressure on the last weeks of the Biden administration to make EJScreen open source, so they released as much code and documentation as they could,' Dr. Gehrke said. It took at least seven people more than three weeks to make a version of EJScreen that was close to its original functionality, and Ms. Mahr said they're still tinkering with it. It's akin to recreating a recipe with an ingredient list but no assembly instructions. Software engineers have to try and remember how the 'dish' tasted last time, and then use trial and error to reassemble it from memory. Now, the coalition is working to conserve even more complicated data sets, like climate data from NOAA, which hosts many petabytes — think a thousand terabytes, or more than a million gigabytes — of weather observations and climate models in its archives. 'People may not understand just how much data that is,' Dr. Gehrke said in an email. It could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per month just in storage fees, she said, without including the cost of any sort of access. She said they were talking to NOAA personnel to prioritize the most vulnerable and highest impact data to preserve as soon as possible. So far, the data they've collected is largely stored in the cloud and backed up using servers around the globe; they've worked out pro bono agreements to avoid having to pay to back it up. Some data have, so far, been left alone, like statistics from the Energy Information Administration, among other agencies. Zane Selvans, a fellow co-founder of Catalyst Cooperative said the group had worked for the past eight years to aggregate U.S. energy system data and research in the form of open source tools. The goal is to increase access to federal data that is technically available but not necessarily easy to use. 'So far we've been lucky,' Mr. Selvans said. 'Folks working on environmental justice haven't been as lucky.'
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How to find climate data and science the Trump administration doesn't want you to see
Information on the internet might seem like it's there forever, but it's only as permanent as people choose to make it. That's apparent as the second Trump administration 'floods the zone' with efforts to dismantle science agencies and the data and websites they use to communicate with the public. The targets range from public health and demographics to climate science. We are a research librarian and policy scholar who belong to a network called the Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of nonprofits, archivists and researchers who rely on federal data in our analysis, advocacy and litigation and are working to ensure that data remains available to the public. In just the first three weeks of Trump's term, we saw agencies remove access to at least a dozen climate and environmental justice analysis tools. The new administration also scrubbed the phrase 'climate change' from government websites, as well as terms like 'resilience.' Here's why and how Public Environmental Data Partners and others are making sure that the climate science the public depends on is available forever: The internet and the availability of data are necessary for innovation, research and daily life. Climate scientists analyze NASA satellite observations and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather records to understand changes underway in the Earth system, what's causing them and how to protect the climates that economies were built on. Other researchers use these sources alongside Census Bureau data to understand who is most affected by climate change. And every day, people around the world log onto the Environmental Protection Agency's website to learn how to protect themselves from hazards — and to find out what the government is or isn't doing to help. If the data and tools used to understand complex data are abruptly taken off the internet, the work of scientists, civil society organizations and government officials themselves can grind to a halt. The generation of scientific data and analysis by government scientists is also crucial. Many state governments run environmental protection and public health programs that depend on science and data collected by federal agencies. Removing information from government websites also makes it harder for the public to effectively participate in key processes of democracy, including changes to regulations. When an agency proposes to repeal a rule, for example, it is required to solicit comments from the public, who often depend on government websites to find information relevant to the rule. And when web resources are altered or taken offline, it breeds mistrust in both government and science. Government agencies have collected climate data, conducted complex analyses, provided funding and hosted data in a publicly accessible manner for years. People around the word understand climate change in large part because of U.S. federal data. Removing it deprives everyone of important information about their world. The first Trump administration removed discussions of climate change and climate policies widely across government websites. However, in our research with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative over those first four years, we didn't find evidence that datasets had been permanently deleted. The second Trump administration seems different, with more rapid and pervasive removal of information. In response, groups involved in Public Environmental Data Partners have been archiving climate datasets our community has prioritized, uploading copies to public repositories and cataloging where and how to find them if they go missing from government websites. As of Feb. 13, 2025, we hadn't seen the destruction of climate science records. Many of these data collection programs, such as those at NOAA or EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, are required by Congress. However, the administration had limited or eliminated access to a lot of data. We've seen a targeted effort to systematically remove tools like dashboards that summarize and visualize the social dimensions of climate change. For instance, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool mapped low-income and other marginalized communities that are expected to experience severe climate changes, such as crop losses and wildfires. The mapping tool was taken offline shortly after Trump's first set of executive orders. Most of the original data behind the mapping tool, like the wildfire risk predictions, is still available, but is now harder to find and access. But because the mapping tool was developed as an open-source project, we were able to recreate it. In some cases, entire webpages are offline. For instance, the page for the 25-year-old Climate Change Center at the Department of Transportation doesn't exist anymore. The link just sends visitors back to the department's homepage. Other pages have limited access. For instance, EPA hasn't yet removed its climate change pages, but it has removed 'climate change' from its navigation menu, making it harder to find those pages. Fortunately, our partners at the End of Term Web Archive have captured snapshots of millions of government webpages and made them accessible through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The group has done this after each administration since 2008. If you're looking at a webpage and you think it should include a discussion of climate change, use the 'changes' tool' in the Wayback Machine to check if the language has been altered over time, or navigate to the site's snapshots of the page before Trump's inauguration. You can also find archived climate and environmental justice datasets and tools on the Public Environmental Data Partners website. Other groups are archiving datasets linked in the data portal and making them findable in other locations. Individual researchers are also uploading datasets in searchable repositories like OSF, run by the Center for Open Science. If you are worried that certain data currently still available might disappear, consult this checklist from MIT Libraries. It provides steps for how you can help safeguard federal data. What's unclear is how far the administration will push its attempts to remove, block or hide climate data and science, and how successful it will be. Already, a federal district court judge has ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's removal of access to public health resources that doctors rely on was harmful and arbitrary. These were put back online thanks to that ruling. We worry that more data and information removals will narrow public understanding of climate change, leaving people, communities and economies unprepared and at greater risk. While data archiving efforts can stem the tide of removals to some extent, there is no replacement for the government research infrastructures that produce and share climate data. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Eric Nost, University of Guelph and Alejandro Paz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Read more: How the oil industry and growing political divides turned climate change into a partisan issue 3 ways Trump's EPA could use the language of science to weaken pollution controls What Big Oil knew about climate change, in its own words Eric Nost is affiliated with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative and the Public Environmental Data Partners, which have received funding for some of the work reviewed in this piece from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Sustainable Cities Fund, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Alejandro Paz is affiliated with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
You can still find climate data, science Trump administration doesn't want you to see
Information on the Internet might seem like it's there forever, but it's only as permanent as people choose to make it. That's apparent as the second Trump administration "floods the zone" with efforts to dismantle science agencies and the data and websites they use to communicate with the public. The targets range from public health and demographics to climate science. We are a research librarian and policy scholar who belong to a network called the Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of nonprofits, archivists and researchers who rely on federal data in our analysis, advocacy and litigation, and are working to ensure that data remains available to the public. In just the first three weeks of Trump's term, we saw agencies remove access to at least a dozen climate and environmental justice analysis tools. The new administration also scrubbed the phrase "climate change" from government websites, as well as terms like "resilience." Why government websites and data matter Here's why and how Public Environmental Data Partners and others are making sure that the climate science the public depends on is available forever: The Internet and the availability of data are necessary for innovation, research and daily life. Climate scientists analyze NASA satellite observations and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather records to understand changes underway in the Earth system, what's causing them and how to protect the climates that economies were built on. Other researchers use these sources alongside Census Bureau data to understand who is most affected by climate change. And every day, people around the world log onto the Environmental Protection Agency's website to learn how to protect themselves from hazards - and to find out what the government is or isn't doing to help. If the data and tools used to understand complex data are abruptly taken off the Internet, the work of scientists, civil society organizations and government officials themselves can grind to a halt. The generation of scientific data and analysis by government scientists is also crucial. Many state governments run environmental protection and public health programs that depend on science and data collected by federal agencies. Removing information from government websites also makes it harder for the public to effectively participate in key processes of democracy, including changes to regulations. When an agency proposes to repeal a rule, for example, it is required to solicit comments from the public, who often depend on government websites to find information relevant to the rule. And when web resources are altered or taken offline, it breeds mistrust in both government and science. Government agencies have collected climate data, conducted complex analyses, provided funding and hosted data in a publicly accessible manner for years. People around the word understand climate change in large part because of U.S. federal data. Removing it deprives everyone of important information about their world. Bye-bye data? The first Trump administration removed discussions of climate change and climate policies widely across government websites. However, in our research with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative over those first four years, we didn't find evidence that datasets had been permanently deleted. The second Trump administration seems different, with more rapid and pervasive removal of information. In response, groups involved in Public Environmental Data Partners have been archiving climate datasets our community has prioritized, uploading copies to public repositories and cataloging where and how to find them if they go missing from government websites. As of Thursday, we hadn't seen the destruction of climate science records. Many of these data collection programs, such as those at NOAA or EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, are required by Congress. However, the administration had limited or eliminated access to a lot of data. Maintaining tools for understanding climate change We've seen a targeted effort to systematically remove tools like dashboards that summarize and visualize the social dimensions of climate change. For instance, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool mapped low-income and other marginalized communities that are expected to experience severe climate changes, such as crop losses and wildfires. The mapping tool was taken offline shortly after Trump's first set of executive orders. Most of the original data behind the mapping tool, like the wildfire risk predictions, is still available, but is now harder to find and access. But because the mapping tool was developed as an open-source project, we were able to recreate it. Preserving websites for the future In some cases, entire webpages are offline. For instance, the page for the 25-year-old Climate Change Center at the Department of Transportation doesn't exist anymore. The link just sends visitors back to the department's homepage. Other pages have limited access. For instance, EPA hasn't yet removed its climate change pages, but it has removed "climate change" from its navigation menu, making it harder to find those pages. Fortunately, our partners at the End of Term Web Archive have captured snapshots of millions of government webpages and made them accessible through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The group has done this after each administration since 2008. If you're looking at a webpage and you think it should include a discussion of climate change, use the "changes" tool" in the Wayback Machine to check if the language has been altered over time, or navigate to the site's snapshots of the page before Trump's inauguration. What you can do You can also find archived climate and environmental justice datasets and tools on the Public Environmental Data Partners website. Other groups are archiving datasets linked in the data portal and making them findable in other locations. Individual researchers are also uploading datasets in searchable repositories like OSF, run by the Center for Open Science. If you are worried that certain data currently still available might disappear, consult this checklist from MIT Libraries. It provides steps for how you can help safeguard federal data. Narrowing the knowledge sphere What's unclear is how far the administration will push its attempts to remove, block or hide climate data and science, and how successful it will be. Already, a federal district court judge has ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's removal of access to public health resources that doctors rely on was harmful and arbitrary. These were put back online thanks to that ruling. We worry that more data and information removals will narrow public understanding of climate change, leaving people, communities and economies unprepared and at greater risk. While data archiving efforts can stem the tide of removals to some extent, there is no replacement for the government research infrastructures that produce and share climate data. Eric Nost is an associate professor of geography at the University of Guelph and Alejandro Paz is the energy and environment librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors.
