Scientists Defy Trump to Publish Sweeping U.S. Nature Assessment
- Scientists released the “Nature Record” after Trump halted the original federal assessment just before publication.
- The draft finds U.S. freshwater, marine, and terrestrial ecosystems are degraded, with many species at risk of extinction.
- Researchers raised more than $3 million to finish the work and argue it can still guide future policy and conservation.
Last year, President Trump killed a major assessment on nature, but now, the scientists involved with the research have published a draft of the report independently. In January 2025, just weeks before a first-of-its-kind nature assessment – the National Nature Assessment – was due to be published, President Trump put the final nail in the coffin by ordering those involved with the report to stop all research and cancel its publication.
Over 150 scientists and experts in various fields had already spent thousands of hours conducting research to contribute to the nature assessment since it was launched by the Biden administration on Earth Day in 2022. The project’s director, Philip Levin, was forced to send an email to the contributors to inform them that the assessment was no longer going to be published, despite being almost complete.
However, Levin was adamant that the work had to continue. In a separate email from his personal account, the environmental scientist told those involved that “This work is too important to die… The country needs what we are producing.
Experts who worked on the report decided to support Levin and continue working on the assessment to ensure that the public and policymakers would have access to key findings. Howard Frumkin, a professor of environmental science at the University of Washington School of Public Health, who wrote a chapter of the assessment focused on nature’s effects on human health and wellbeing, stated, “There’s an amazingly unanimous broad consensus that we ought to carry on with the work.”
The assessment consists of 13 chapters, as well as two planned summarising chapters, that were mainly written by teams of around a dozen specialists, focusing on issues such as human health, the economy, and national security. These teams consisted of federal employees, as well as representatives from academia, nonprofit groups, and the private sector, who volunteered their time to work on the project.
In March, after around a year of delay, the researchers released an 868-page draft of the assessment, with the new title of “Nature Record”, for public comment and scientific review. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will still conduct the scientific review of the assessment, as had previously been planned when it was a federal government project. The draft assessment includes a broad range of findings associated with nature in the United States, many of which are less than optimistic.
The researchers found that freshwater ecosystems in the U.S. are “overdrawn, polluted, fragmented and invaded,” and are, overall, in crisis. Meanwhile, marine and terrestrial ecosystems are degraded and have reduced biodiversity. Roughly 34 percent of plant species and 40 percent of animal species are also thought to be at risk of extinction, according to the assessment. The findings show that human pressures on nature are eroding the necessities it provides to us, including clean water, food, health, livelihoods, and protection from storms and fire.
Despite the negative findings, the researchers emphasised that there is still potential to bring about change. “The future is not fixed,” stressed Levin. “Conservation, restoration and renewed connections between people and nature can improve ecosystem health and strengthen community resilience,” the project lead added.
To get to this point, the researchers had to seek out alternative methods for funding the research and publication of the assessment. The group needed to hire new administrative staff and acquire technical support and financing to pay for the review by the National Academies. Over the last year, the group has raised over $3 million to support its ongoing work, mainly from foundations.
The group hopes that the final report will provide a scientific consensus on a broad array of existing findings, on issues affecting nature in the United States, and provide a streamlined assessment that can be used to inform national policy.
This is not the only climate research that the Trump administration has attempted to quash. Trump widely criticised the Congress-mandated national climate assessments, which have been published since 2000, for fearmongering. The Department of Energy (DoE) released a separate report last year, which downplayed the threat of climate change and disputed much of the evidence presented in the original assessments.
The DoE report was widely critiqued by climate scientists for being factually inaccurate, and, in January, a federal judge ruled that the DoE broke the law when Energy Secretary Chris Wright handpicked five researchers who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to write the report. The legal ruling has led to further scrutiny of Trump administration claims about the “overstating” of climate change.
Over the last year, the Trump administration has sought to water down several climate policies and restrict research on climate change and related fields. The publication of the draft of the newly titled Nature Record and high levels of financial support for the assessment show that there is still widespread backing for projects of this nature, despite Trump’s best efforts to quash the research.
By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com
No comments:
Post a Comment