Researchers in the US are pushing back against moves by the Trump administration to remove crucial climate data from government websites. One such move involving the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the latest example of a patchwork of efforts underway to archive and protect scientific data as the US overhauls federal agencies.
In December, FEMA published an interactive map on its website detailing how climate change could affect the risk of hurricanes, floods, wildfires and other hazards across the country. Then, in mid-February, the map quietly disappeared.
But the FEMA tool wasn鈥檛 gone for long. A week later, the map reappeared on a hosted by the software development platform GitHub. The new tool functions better than it did when it was hosted by the FEMA site, says , a software engineer who rebuilt the map from scratch along with his colleague .
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Before it was removed on 19 February, Desai and Herzog gathered screenshots of the site and downloaded all the data associated with the map. It took them a few weeks to build an interactive map to represent the data just like the original.
Researchers are especially concerned about losing climate data that helps communicate the risks certain regions face due to warming. For instance, the recreated map shows how under a high emissions scenario, Florida鈥檚 Miami-Dade County could see annual losses related to coastal flooding jump more than sixfold, up to $29 million by the middle of the century.
At least 200 people have from FEMA since January. Employees were ordered to remove language related to climate change from FEMA websites and publications. They were also told to report anyone continuing to work on climate change to managers, according to a source who works with the agency but who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a general feeling of paranoia and fear,鈥� the person said.
The map depicting future risk with climate change was the product of more than two years of work to incorporate climate change into FEMA鈥檚 National Risk Index. This tool is widely used by local governments, emergency management planners and other private users to study county-level risk for more than a dozen natural hazards. FEMA did not respond to a request for comment.
鈥淲e鈥檙e seeing this broad attack on tools related to climate and health and environmental justice,鈥� says at Harvard University, who has been involved in efforts to preserve federal data and web pages. Other have archived聽all of the hundreds of thousands of datasets on the federal government鈥檚 . He says the creation of the map was particularly significant because it represented the government acknowledging the cost of climate change.
Article amended on 3 March 2025
We clarified which federal data preservation efforts Gilmour is involved in.
