NASA cuts off international climate science support

NASA cuts off international climate science support

The world’s nations convened this week in Hangzhou, China, to plan the next major international assessment of climate science—but without the United States. Late last week, President Donald Trump’s administration denied officials permission to travel to the meeting and cut off a technical support contract for the report, the seventh assessment of the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The decision, first reported by Axios, is the first time the administration has targeted international climate science.

The news caught climate scientists off guard. During the first Trump administration there was no interference with IPCC, says Angel Hsu, a climatologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who is serving on an upcoming IPCC special report on climate change and cities. “This is really shocking,” she says. “Not having the U.S. adequately represented is going to be a huge loss not just for the country, but for the assessment.”

The U.S. has long been a leader of IPCC, which for decades has brought volunteer scientists together, unpaid, to produce influential reports every seven or so years. Katherine Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist, was set to co-lead IPCC’s third working group, focused on climate mitigation, for its seventh assessment, due near the end of the decade. Former President Joe Biden’s administration committed roughly $1.5 million for a technical support unit (TSU), a small team that would help with creating graphics and websites, running meetings, and editing the group’s report.

Although U.S. contributions to IPCC are typically run out of the White House by the Global Change Research Program, NASA is the lead on managing GCRP’s contracts. NASA leadership, not GCRP, decided to end the TSU contract, a source with knowledge of the decision told Science. Calvin also did not travel to Hangzhou this week, a NASA spokesperson told CNN. (NASA has not responded to a query from Science.)

At the same time, last week the Department of State reportedly opted to not allow its diplomatic delegation to travel to Hangzhou for the meeting. It’s unclear whether these two decisions are related, sources said. Either way, they meant a minimal U.S. presence at the meeting, with only one U.S. official—Ko Barrett, deputy secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization and longtime researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—playing a prominent role.

At the meeting, countries will agree on draft outlines for the three sections of the next climate assessment and try to pick up the pieces. One co-chair of the third working group remains—Joy Jacqueline Pereira, a climate scientist at Kebangsaan Malaysia University—and IPCC was said to be scrambling to find a developed country to step into the U.S. role and provide the other co-chair. “I think the IPCC will find a way to reconstitute [the TSU] but it will require unprecedented institutional creativity,” says Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and author on IPCC’s sixth assessment report.

As of now, the GCRP contract that supports U.S. scientists to travel to IPCC meetings has not been canceled, sources said. Still, Hsu, who is set to travel to a meeting in Japan next month for the cities report, worries her travel expenses won’t be covered. “I can still participate, but that can be really challenging if the funding we depend on is cut off,” she says. With the time zone differences, doing this work online—as happened during the sixth assessment because of the pandemic—is far less efficient than simply getting everyone in the same room for a week, she says.

After the current IPCC meeting, member states are meant to solicit nominations of scientists to take part in the seventh assessment. GCRP usually runs the process, but the administration’s moves have some wondering whether it will proceed as normal. If not, IPCC does allow scientists to self-nominate without their country’s involvement. But U.S. authors might be shut out anyway if travel funding ends, says Eric Chu, director of science services at the California Council on Science and Technology, who participated in a scoping meeting for the report last year. “I’m worried there will be no U.S. presence in the full seventh assessment cycle.”

However it plays out, some damage to the U.S.’s reputation has already been done, Kopp says. “The U.S. moves are certainly of a piece with other recent moves by the U.S. government to end the United States’s long established position of global scientific leadership.”