Giving Compass' Take:

• While federal datasets remain, significant changes have been made to funding structures, language, and accessibility in order to obstruct scientific findings the administration finds inconvenient. 

• How does the gap in new research and accessibility impact the nation's understanding of and willingness to combat climate change? How can donors fill the gap left by the administration? 

• Find out why climate philanthropy has failed to achieve its goals so far. 

After Donald Trump won the presidential election, hundreds of volunteers around the U.S. came together to “rescue” federal data on climate change, thought to be at risk under the new administration.

But what has happened since? Did the data vanish?

As of one year later, there has been no great purge. Federal data sets related to environmental and climate science are still accessible in the same ways they were before Trump took office.

4 Changes:
  1. Documents are difficult to find: Documents on existing international environmental treaties and national climate policy have been buried or removed from departments’ current websites.
  2. Web pages are buried: Some administrative pages have disappeared from agency sites and can be accessed only from the Obama-era web archive. The EPA appears to have been hit the worst. Two hundred of the original 380 web pages on climate and energy resources for state, local and tribal governments are now accessible in archival form only.
  3. Language has been altered: Departments have scrubbed websites of environmental terms. The term “climate change,” for instance, no longer exists across certain web pages of several agencies.
  4. Science has been silenced: Columbia’s Silencing Science Tracker records 116 instances when scientists have been obstructed. The list includes budget cuts, staff cuts, unfilled positions and suspended funds. Climate-related research projects have been canceled and climate fellowships rescinded. In some cases, advisory boards and research centers have been dismantled entirely.

Read the full article on government climate information under Trump by Morgan Currie and Britt S. Paris at The Conversation