‘Digital ark’ set to safeguard climate data from Trump

In the weeks following the re-election of United States President Donald J Trump – who had made clear his intent to defund large swaths of America’s scientific infrastructure, especially anything to do with climate science – a team of computer scientists and management students in Montréal, Québec, in Canada, rushed to put the finishing touches to a central repository for climate research, data and other sustainability-related information.

The Sustainability Academic Network, or SUSAN, was conceived a year and a half ago as a one-stop, multifaceted platform where researchers could find information on the impact of climate change on forests, rivers and cities, and on plastics in the oceans and industrial greenhouse gas emissions, as well as research funding sources.

With Trump’s return to power, McGill University Professor Juan C Serpa, who leads the team of faculty and students, added another mission to SUSAN’s to-do list: “Protect scientific data in the United States from disappearing.”

According to an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, during Trump’s first administration, 26% of US government websites with terms like “climate change”, “clean energy” and “adaptation” went dark.

“The day after the [2024] inauguration, the administration took down the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool – a map that had layers of information from multiple agencies about climate and economic vulnerabilities,” writes Jessica McKenzie for the Bulletin.

Since then, thousands of URLs for thousands of datasets in all areas of science now lead only to the ‘404 Error’.

“We’re really losing our history here; we’re losing our environmental history,” Rachel Santarsiero, director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project, housed at George Washington University (Washington, DC), told the Bulletin in early March.

Also in March, Forbes magazine reported that other data that has disappeared from US government websites includes the National Ocean and Atmospheric Agency’s Climate Data.

Also missing is the Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, which provided access to the Environmental Protection Agency’s data on “pollution exposure and racial disparities”.

Collective impact

Raised in Colombia, Serpa is fully aware that the word ‘disappeared’ is redolent of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, which he read as a young teen, and Stalinist Russia. Serpa immigrated to Canada at the age of 18 to live in a hippie commune in Ontario with the intention of returning to Colombia.

“You could say that my dream was to become a left-wing social leader and go back to Colombia,” he said. At the time, Colombia was in the grip of a decades-old civil war, chiefly between the right-wing governments and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. The war ended with a peace agreement signed in 2016.

Now a tenured professor at McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management, Serpa sees SUSAN as a mature version of his teenage belief that grassroots politics could be used to create collective impact in an effort to avert climate catastrophe or, as he put it, “doomsday”.

“This is what scares me. We’re at a time when we have no time to lose. And right now, we have a mixture of very dark political times – just when we need the most cooperation to deal with climate change.”

While the 50 or so bachelor, masters and PhD students Serpa directs are connected with McGill, the university does not fund the SUSAN project. Funding comes from private sources and grants, though the bulk of the labour is volunteered.

“We’re [software] developers, and our work starts (after our day jobs) at 11 pm because we are working with people in India,” said Serpa.

To gather the links to the datasets that are being preserved in what amounts to a digital ark, Serpa has sent out thousands of emails to professors and researchers asking them to link their data. “I thought I was going to be the biggest spammer in academia,” he noted.

Undoing the siloes

SUSAN, which was accessed by 39,000 researchers last week, can be thought of as a LinkedIn of sustainability for academics, but one organised on very different principles than those of academia.

“At universities, we're organising ways to think of disciplines and fields. Professors are in buildings called ‘Business’, ‘Medical’, ‘Engineering’. These are the silos we create.

“But climate change solutions and sustainability are solutions that actually need the collaboration of researchers in different disciplines. There's not a sustainability or climate change school, barring a few examples,” he said.

To achieve a de-siloed database, Serpa and his team determined 60 themes, including natural disasters, sustainable tourism, supply chains, biofuels, hydro and tidal power, pest management and wind energy.

These were fed into an AI system which then read 400,000 articles and linked them through these themes, which were then grouped together under five main categories: economic sustainability; environmental sustainability; governance and policy; social sustainability; and technology and innovation.

“The problem was that we had all of these resources fragmented throughout the world, and we wanted to put them all in one place so that we could communicate and collaborate better. This will generate more efficient research on climate change,” Serpa said.

SUSAN does not house the project’s 4,000 datasets but works as a curated directory.

The data remains where the researchers have placed it for safekeeping or where it has been salvaged by organisations such as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, Source Cooperation and Social Explorer.

The latter, according to Forbes, had by early March already salvaged “over 11,000 web pages and countless datasets from federal agencies”. SUSAN routes (links) researchers to where the data can be accessed.

Doing things differently

True to his youthful belief in social collectivism, Serpa told University World News that he sees SUSAN as an alternative to the academic system of publish or perish, where a professor’s success is measured by the number of articles they publish and the number of times they are cited in prestigious journals.

In his own field of business technology and innovation, “the world is moving so fast that we cannot keep up with the publications, while the writing of articles is a very slow model, which is something I’ve written on,” he says.

“With SUSAN,” Serpa explained, “I wanted to do something to connect people and do things differently. But I had the support of my dean, and I had tenure. Thanks to that, I was able to get SUSAN started.”