Dr. Eric Nost, a professor at the University of Guelph, has been actively working to preserve critical climate change datasets in response to recent U.S. government cuts to climate research and policy. With the loss of funding, suppression of key environmental data, and the dismantling of research programs in the U.S., Canadian scientists like Dr. Nost are stepping in to protect valuable scientific information before it disappears. We were delighted to speak with Dr. Nost to understand the significance of this work and what it means for the future of climate research in Canada and beyond.
The following transcript is an interpretation of the dialogue for our interview, adjusted slightly for clarity.
Dr. Sarah Laframboise (E4D): Let’s start with a bit of background. Can you share how you became involved in preserving climate data and what motivated you to take action?
Dr. Eric Nost: My work in this space began eight years ago during the first Trump administration. At that time, I joined the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which was formed almost immediately after Trump’s election. His campaign rhetoric signaled an intent to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), so a group of researchers and advocates mobilized to monitor and preserve crucial environmental data.
I was in the U.S. at the time, completing my PhD, and had experience working with EPA datasets. I understood their value and the risks of losing them. My early involvement with EDGI focused on website monitoring—we tracked changes to federal agency websites, looking for subtle alterations in language around climate change and outright removals of web pages. Over time, our work expanded from simply archiving data to ensuring it remained accessible and useful for public engagement and policymaking.
Interestingly, many of EDGI’s early members were Canadian researchers who had lived through Canada’s “war on science” under the Harper government. Their experience during that time with the destruction of government libraries, such as at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), and the muzzling of scientists informed our strategy in the U.S., providing perspective on what could unfold.
Dr. Sarah Laframboise (E4D): You mentioned Canada’s experience under Harper. How does what’s happening in the U.S. now compare?
Dr. Eric Nost: While I’m not deeply familiar with the Harper-era policies, I can say that what we’re seeing in the U.S. today is on a different scale. The speed and scope of the current administration’s actions against science have taken many of us by surprise. Even those of us who were prepared for another attack on environmental data didn’t anticipate the speed at which this administration has moved to undermine science, but also to do so on such a greater scale, across many more agencies.
This administration is targeting the very foundations of public science, and we can see many different examples of this whether that’s withholding funds for universities, a tax on funding agencies within the government, like the National Science Foundation (NSF), or proposing the closure of entire research divisions within agencies like the EPA. We certainly didn’t see changes of this magnitude under Harper or even during Trump’s first term. It makes what we’re seeing here quite unprecedented in those terms.
Dr. Sarah Laframboise (E4D): Let’s dive into the data itself. Why are these datasets so crucial for climate research, and what kinds of information do they contain?
Dr. Eric Nost: I think it’s important to lay out a couple of distinctions about what we’re talking about. There are two main categories of concern. First, we have datasets that are still technically available through the U.S. government but remain vulnerable. Some examples include various National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data sets. These various biophysical measures of climate, such as temperature, are critical for climate scientists to run models to understand what the climate is and how it’s changing. Or this might include NASA. Various NASA data sets from satellite imagery or satellite-based data products help us understand how a changing climate means changing land cover and land uses that we can sense from satellites. So those kinds of data sets are certainly vulnerable and important, but we haven’t generally seen them removed or eliminated yet.
Then, there are the already removed datasets—what some have called the “woke data sets.” The current administration has specifically targeted environmental justice data. For example, datasets that link climate risks, like wildfire or flooding, to demographic data on vulnerable populations have been taken offline. These datasets are essential because they don’t just tell us how and where the climate is changing, but also who is most affected and who is responsible for those changes. So these types of datasets that marry these two are the ones we’ve been archiving and seeing removed from U.S. websites and public access. This is a real shame because we need that information.
If you break down what type of information this is, it’s datasets in spreadsheets, zip files, images and text, but it’s also the removal of interactive tools that make data more accessible. This is much more meaningful to end users and the public. Further, we are seeing the removal of websites where the way issues are described is changing. While removing data sets is a real concern for researchers, we also have to keep in mind the impact that changes to other products that governments put out have to make the underlying data meaningful to the public.
Dr. Sarah Laframboise (E4D): That’s incredibly concerning. Can you give specific examples of how these losses impact climate research, disaster preparedness, or environmental policy?
Dr. Eric Nost: There are so many, but I will share a few key examples that come to mind.
The U.S. government is the world’s largest publisher of information. This considers what the US federal government puts out on paper and in the Library of Congress stores, as well as what they publish online and on web pages. We often take for granted visible and legitimate sources of information. For example, the US EPA website is visited by thousands of people from around the world every day, and they see it as an authoritative source of information about all sorts of issues, from climate change, bed bugs, lead, and drinking water. When authoritative sources like this alter or remove content, it becomes harder for the public and policymakers to access reliable information on climate change, pollution, and health risks. Particularly for the public, this changes the way the public perceives and talks about these issues.
Under the first Trump administration, we also saw the removal of information relevant to changes in public policy rules. For instance, when they proposed rolling back the Clean Power Plan, which required certain controls on emissions from power plants, they also took down web pages explaining what this rule was about. This included the kind of impact this rule change would have on climate change and air quality issues. This really undermines the public’s ability to provide informed comments on regulatory changes.
Another example is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s risk maps, which provide critical hazard data, such as risk of tornadoes, earthquakes, flooding and more. They are important to communities in the U.S. who are impacted, but also to folks outside of the U.S. who may be trying to understand if they should, for example, invest in a certain community by building a new factory. I would want to know whether there are environmental risks to consider. Unfortunately, these datasets are no longer accessible outside the U.S. Ironically, this undermines the rhetoric we hear from the Trump administration about encouraging outside investments.
The last example that comes to mind is the Environmental Justice Screening Tool (EJScreen), which helped communities demonstrate how environmental harm is affecting them. This quantitative evidence would help agencies, such as the EPA or Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), to show that particular harms come from air and water pollution in order to form an action plan to implement change. With its removal, activists and researchers lose an important tool for holding decision-makers accountable. At EDGI, we have recreated this resource, so thankfully, it is still available, but it doesn’t carry the same weight as it would have if the government had published it themselves. This seems like a fundamental tool for democracy, which allows the public to comment and engage in advocacy on different issues.
Dr. Sarah Laframboise (E4D): How much do we rely on U.S. federal climate data?
Dr. Eric Nost: Canada—and the entire world—relies on U.S. investments in climate science and data. For example, NOAA provides crucial weather data, climate modelling, and predictions that are used globally. Some of this is actually congressionally mandated, which would make that less at risk, and this may be why we haven’t seen this fully taken offline yet. However, the Trump administration has shown a willingness to ignore such protections.
NOAA also collects data on key fisheries relevant to the Great Lakes and coastal ecosystems. Additionally, EPA pollution reports help us understand trans-border air pollution affecting provinces like Ontario by requiring industry to report on what they’re putting out. Similarly, NASA is also an important source of satellite imagery, which researchers worldwide use. I don’t think we will lose these tomorrow since many of them are congressionally mandated, but I think the real risk is surrounding the impact on capacity and funding to support this type of work. If you don’t have the people and teams to collect and share that data, then it’s not going to happen. That’s where you start to get gaps in data sets. This has large consequences for climate change data, often requiring long-term tracking over years to see how things change.
Dr. Sarah Laframboise (E4D): On a personal level, how has this work impacted you?
Dr. Eric Nost: It’s a really disheartening process. There are a lot of other things that I’d rather be doing. That said, there is a great community that’s formed around this that shares these values of accountability, transparency, justice and community. There’s certainly been a sense of solidarity amongst folks.
We anticipated many of these challenges before the inauguration, since we sensed that this was coming based on what we saw the first time around and the rhetoric during the campaign. That being said, certainly some removals still caught us off guard, and there are some things we didn’t get to in time that we’ve been unable to back up, to locate or recreate. This is unfortunate.
There is something to be said about the climate in the US right now around higher education. I work with many folks who are researchers based at universities and nonprofit organizations, but there is certainly a feeling that it’s harder to speak out about some of these things. Perhaps as a Canadian-based researcher, I have more freedom to discuss these issues publicly than some of my U.S. colleagues.
Dr. Sarah Laframboise (E4D): What can Canadian institutions, policymakers, or the public do to help?
Dr. Eric Nost: Universities should continue supporting freedom of expression and researchers like myself who are doing this type of work and commit to the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. We want to build science that is representative of all and includes everyone.
One of the reasons we see this in the U.S. is simply because of the differences in governments, where the U.S. has a much more centralized form of administration. This means you have nationwide data sets on everything. Whereas here in Canada, we have a much more decentralized province-by-province, territory-by-territory system where you end up with 13 different data sets on environmental penalties or compliance with environmental law, for example. This is a blessing and a curse because you can’t go and delete the whole thing, but it means that when we are trying to understand what is happening nationwide, there can be challenges to that.
