The website that hosts the most recent edition of the National Climate Assessment has gone dark. The sprawling report is the most influential source of information about how climate change affects the United States.
The National Climate Assessment is widely used by teachers, city planners, farmers, judges and regular citizens looking for answers to common questions such as how quickly sea levels are rising near American cities and how to deal with wildfire smoke exposure. The most recent edition had a searchable atlas that allowed anyone to learn about the current and future effects of global warming in their specific town or state.
On Monday, the government website that hosts all of that information stopped working.
The Trump administration had already halted work on the next edition of the report, and fired all the staff who worked on it.
The White House did not respond to questions about why the climate report website was taken down, or whether the administration plans to create the next edition of the climate assessment as Congress mandates.
Congress requires the federal government to publish the National Climate Assessment every four years. The last edition was published in 2023, and underscored the degree to which climate change is expensive, deadly and preventable.
“If you are a human being in the United States, your life is already being impacted by climate change whether you know it or not,” says Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist who was one of the authors of the report. “If we don’t recognize that, it’s simply because we haven’t connected the dots. And the National Climate Assessment was one of the primary tools connecting those dots.”
The next edition was supposed to be released in 2027, and about 400 volunteer authors had started working on it. That work stopped after all the federal staff who coordinate it were let go in April.
You can still access the National Climate Assessment on other websites
Although the original National Climate Assessment website is down, it’s still possible to access the information.
An archived version of the most recent edition is available through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All five editions of the National Climate Assessment that have been published over the years will also be available on NASA’s website, according to NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens. NASA doesn’t yet know when that website will be available to the public.
NOAA’s archive site is not searchable the way the original website was. An archived version of the original, searchable website is available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine tool here.
The interactive atlas portion of the National Climate Assessment, which allows users to zoom in on specific locations, is still available on a website hosted by the mapping software company Esri. The climate assessment used that company’s map platform to publish the interactive atlas tool.
Transcript:
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Trump administration has shut down a website that’s home to a series of major national reports on climate change. NPR’s Alejandra Borunda reports on what that means.
ALEJANDRA BORUNDA, BYLINE: Back in the 1990s, Congress asked U.S. scientists to produce a series of reports. The National Climate Assessments were supposed to come out every four years, and they were intended to round up the best, newest research on how climate change affects the country. Over the decades, those reports honed in on one big point.
KATHARINE HAYHOE: What the National Climate Assessment showed so clearly is that if you are a human being living in the United States, your life is already being impacted by climate change, whether you know it or not.
BORUNDA: That’s Katharine Hayhoe. She’s the chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy and a climate scientist who has worked on several of the assessments.
HAYHOE: If we don’t recognize that, it’s simply because we haven’t connected the dots, and the National Climate Assessment was one of the primary tools connecting those dots.
BORUNDA: Hundreds of scientists worked on the reports. They were used by policymakers, city planners, business owners and regular people to figure out things like where neighborhoods might be endangered by sea level rise or which places were most at-risk during heat waves or droughts. Hayhoe says the reports also pointed out ways to solve the challenges.
HAYHOE: The choices that we make today will determine the magnitude of the impacts we face tomorrow.
BORUNDA: Urban planning expert Ladd Keith, from the University of Arizona says the loss of the reports will leave many smaller cities or rural areas in the dark about their climate risks.
LADD KEITH: A lot of them rely on the National Climate Assessment because they don’t have the resources locally to do their own climate profiles or to explore the impacts of climate change in their own community.
BORUNDA: Keith says the loss of the reports, along with other federal climate data sets…
KEITH: It’s a little bit like watching the modern version of a book burning.
BORUNDA: A NASA spokesperson told NPR that PDFs of the reports will eventually find a new home on a NASA website, but they don’t know when. And there are even more questions about the next edition of the assessment, which was in progress and was supposed to come out in 2027. But in April, the Trump administration dismissed all the scientists working on it, including Keith.
Alejandra Borunda, NPR News.