(Science|Business) Climate monitoring must remain a global enterprise, experts say

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The EU has been trying to step up and ensure continuous global climate and weather monitoring services after Donald Trump ordered US federal agencies to take down environmental databases in 2025. But experts point out that gathering reliable research data on the state of the planet should remain a global enterprise and the US still has a role to play.

As politicians around the world gathered in Davos to mourn the dismantling of a rules-based international order that has helped promote open scientific collaboration for decades, science stakeholders call for a continuation of global data sharing and monitoring.

“As we are all aware, the US contributes significantly to fundamental weather and climate research, as much as to the global observing system,” said Harilaos Loukos, founder of the Climate Data Factory, a French commercial climate service provider. “Any degradation in these contributions will most certainly affect the quality of global datasets that everyone relies on.”

That includes European services such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Florian Pappenberger, its new director-general, is concerned that the integrity of the system may be at risk. “The issue is tomorrow’s data,” he told Science|Business on the sidelines of a press conference in Brussels. 

“Are we going to fund these observing networks?” he continued. “Are we going to fund these types of observations? Are we going to ensure these observations get recorded and stored appropriately for everyone to access? Do they get transmitted globally to the global observing systems?”

“Data and observation are central to the global effort to confront climate change and air quality challenges,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), in an emailed statement. “These challenges know no borders, and nor should the knowledge, insights and data that define, measure and help us respond to them.”

The concern is not limited to satellite observations. The Argo programme, for instance, has deployed some 4,000 drifting robotic floats to collect data such as seawater temperature and salinity. While 30 different countries contribute, the US provides roughly 50% of the global array. 

“Having a programme such as Argo stopped could blind us for many, many years,” Buontempo said. “It’s not just about historical data; it’s very much about updating and ensuring that we keep record of what’s happening.”

Data backup

Pappenberger is not so worried about historical data, given ongoing efforts to save them. He cited a recent pledge by Neil Jacobs, who took the helm of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in October, not to delete datasets. Meanwhile, US non-profit Climate Central is picking up NOAA’s billion-dollar tracking of climate crisis-fuelled disasters, which was axed by Trump last May.

“My worry is about [. . .] the data which we’re currently measuring,” Pappenberger said. “If I don’t measure them now, they’re gone.” 

Loukos has a similar concern. “The potential fragmentation of the global climate data ecosystem creates operational uncertainty precisely when climate adaptation investments are most needed,” he said. “Fortunately, climate data infrastructure is now distributed globally across many nations, but maintaining this network requires sustained international cooperation.”

The ECMWF, for example, has the advantage of partnering with the World Meteorological Organization, which has a legal framework that mandates the free and unrestricted exchange of earth system data among its 193 members. But whether the Trump administration will respect this framework remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the EU is trying to reduce its reliance on foreign-controlled databases and develop independent, “Trump-proof” infrastructure to prevent its researchers and policymakers from being vulnerable to geopolitical shifts and commercial interests.

“We always need to have a backup of data. We should always have more than one organisation be the steward or the holder of those data,” Pappenberger said. “Irrespective of what any administration or government in the world does, there should be somebody else keeping or at least providing access to this type of data [. . .] because data gets corrupted.”

Informed policies

While Loukos has not yet seen any impact on the work of authoritative climate data providers such as the C3S and ECMWF, which his organisation relies heavily on, he expects Trump’s crackdown on science to affect them in the mid- to long term. “There is general uncertainty in the climate data community about policy continuity,” he said.

“Trump’s administration is deleting and editing history and data,” Gabi Lombardo, director of the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities, told Science|Business. “Without the continuation of data collection and with the threat of gaps in the data series, it is hard to provide effective social policies, based on stable research evidence.”

Buontempo meanwhile insisted on the critical role of data in informing political decisions. “It’s there, relentlessly, month after month, giving you an estimate of where we could be in 10 years, in 15 years,” he said. 

“Knowledge about the future has an economic value which, in my opinion, is immense. As a society, we are not taking the full value out of this information, and that’s a pity,” he added. “We can have different views, we can discuss, we can take different political positions, but this is the evidence. Not using it is just being blind.”

There is broad agreement that the consequences of US decisions extend beyond research. “When data collection becomes politicised, societies lose the factual base for informed policy and, ultimately, for democratic decisions,” said Ramon Puras, secretary general of university network Aurora. “Europe should take this as a warning: even strong institutions can lose ground if scientific evidence is delegitimised.”

For Marta Dell’Aquila, researcher in the global governance, regulation, innovation and digital economy unit at the Centre for European Policy Studies, the main problem is that the disciplines targeted by politicians such as Trump are often framed as a form of activism rather than legitimate research fields. In such cases, these end up “trapped in the rhetoric of ideology or political opinion, when in fact this isn’t about left or right; it’s about rights, evidence and equality,” she said.

Against this backdrop, Lombardo says it is essential for Europe to “maintain the routine administrative functions of government, such as reliable and apolitical data collection and public statistics analysis.”