Effort begins to fill the void left by terminated US climate report

Last year, the Trump administration did what it could to shut down work on the next US National Climate Assessment, eliminating funding for the US Global Change Research Program and booting hundreds of contributing authors. The administration even took past reports offline, forcing others to host copies so the information would still be accessible. And this all comes despite the fact that these reports are legally required.

Later in the year, the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society announced an effort to give researchers a central place to compile the kind of work that would have fed the next US report, as well as potential regional and local reports. This “US Climate Collection” works differently from the US Global Change Research Program or the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Rather than facilitating the writing of a giant, coordinated report, the groups are inviting teams of researchers to publish peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, which will then be added to a centralized resource for future report-writers.

The first paper has now been added to that collection. It’s the work of 149 authors (many of whom had been working on the US report), and it is actually being published in two journals—one operated by the American Geophysical Union and one by the American Meteorological Society. That’s because this paper is intended to provide a roadmap to prioritize future contributions.

Assessment reports like those produced by the US and the IPCC serve several purposes. Primarily, their authors read thousands of public papers so you don’t have to and provide a summary of what the existing evidence can and cannot tell us about a given topic. Not only does that give non-scientists a quick way to catch up on what we know, but it also creates reference points that are heavily cited by researchers themselves as they work to extend our knowledge.

In addition to being sources of information about scientific progress, assessment reports are also intended to be directly useful for planning and policymaking at all levels. Whether you’re a major city planning infrastructure to prevent flooding or a farmer looking to separate climate trends from weather variability, these reports should be go-to resources.