After the Trump administration dismantled key parts of the federal process behind the next National Climate Assessment, major scientific groups moved quickly to keep the work alive.
Their workaround aims to preserve a crucial stream of climate information that communities, researchers, and policymakers rely on to prepare for growing risks.
Here's what to know
In 2025, the administration upended a climate reporting process required under federal law by cutting support for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, dismissing hundreds of contributors to the next U.S. National Climate Assessment, and taking earlier reports offline, Ars Technica reported.
To fill part of that void, the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society created the U.S. Climate Collection, a research hub that resembles the material the next national report would have drawn on, with room for regional and local reports too.
The collection's first paper has been published in both Earth's Future and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It has 149 authors, among them many scientists who had been contributing to the canceled U.S. report.
Under this approach, teams release separate peer-reviewed journal studies first, and those papers can later be assembled in one central resource for whoever writes future assessments, instead of starting with a single sprawling coordinated report.
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More background
These assessments are designed to do more than present technical material to specialists. By sorting through thousands of published papers, they lay out in one place what the research does and does not establish about climate patterns and their effects.
For local decision-makers, that synthesis can be very helpful: city officials consult it when planning flood-resistant infrastructure, and farmers can use it to tell longer-term climate change apart from annual weather variability that affects planting and harvests.
They also serve as common reference documents in the scientific literature, giving researchers a widely cited baseline for future work. When that system is interrupted, the consequences reach far beyond Washington.
What's being done?
As part of the effort, the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society want research groups to publish peer-reviewed journal articles that can eventually be compiled into a shared source for later report writers.
That opening paper is meant to map out priorities for what comes next, which could aid both future assessment authors and the creation of regional or local reports.
One step you can take is donating to climate causes, which can help fund organizations working on science, resilience, and public education. Communities still need reliable climate guidance for flood planning, farming, and infrastructure decisions, and researchers are finding ways to keep that knowledge moving forward.
Where can I learn more?
Here's more on how the federal rollback of U.S. climate science and public information has unfolded. These stories cover staff dismissals, website restoration, budget cuts, monitoring losses, and nonprofit climate work.
• Scientists condemned the hundreds of dismissals that gutted work on the next National Climate Assessment.
• Former federal workers and a nonprofit brought Climate.gov back after Trump-era cuts.
• U.S. forecasters issued a warning after officials scrapped a climate and ocean monitoring network.
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