The draft was ready to be submitted within a month. Over 150 scientists and other experts spent thousands of hours in line with the report, the first assessment of nature across the nation.
However, President Trump has concluded the efforts launched under the Biden administration by executive order. So on January 30th, the project director, an environmental scientist named Phil Levin, sent an email informing members of his team that his work had been cancelled.
But it wasn't the only email he sent that day.
“This work is too important to die,” Dr. Levin wrote in another email from the author of the report, this one from his personal account. “The country needs what we produce.”
According to an interview with nine of the leading authors, the leading experts who have now worked on a report called the National Nature Assessment are thinking of ways to complete it and publish it outside of government.
“There's an incredibly unanimous wide consensus that we should continue to work,” says Howard Fulmkin, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Washington's School of Public Health.
The study aimed to measure how national land, water and wildlife are run, how they change, and what it means to people.
Most of the 12 chapters were written by a team of around 12 experts. Some were federal employees, but the majority of the authors came from outside the government – academia, nonprofits, private sector – they had already volunteered their time. The author stated that he expected most or all teams to continue working.
The first completed draft was on February 11th. When researchers were told the project had been cancelled, some were almost finished their chapters and simply polished. Others were competing against deadlines.
Rajat Panwar, a professor of responsible and sustainable business at Oregon State University, led the chapter on nature and economics, but prepared a slide to present his section when he receives the news. Ta. He sees the team he hired, who hired, who hired, as a calling to help solve one of the most pressing issues of that generation: nature loss and biodiversity. I said that.
“The economic dependence on nature” is the subject investigated in his group's 6,000-word chapter “is understated, understood and underestimated,” Dr. Panwar said.
However, efforts to make it public outside the government raised major questions under discussion. What is the best way to publish it? How do the authors guarantee rigour and peer review? Who is their target audience? Who will pay for certain key coordinators, as federal employees cannot continue? Who will provide the oversight that comes from the Federal Steering Committee?
And perhaps the most difficult question: how can the report maintain the height and impact of government valuations so that it is not published by the government?
“We just want to make sure that whatever product is being produced can move the needle into conversation, for the Stanford environment, which led the chapter on nature and climate change.
Legal issues related to research ownership would not be an issue, said Peter Lee, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in intellectual property law and is not involved in the efforts. Ta.
“A general rule is that government work is not subject to copyright,” Lee said.
The draft was developed under the auspices of the US Global Change Research Program, the same federal group that oversees the National Climate Assessment. However, these reports are mandatory by Congress, but the natural assessment was powered through an executive order issued by President Biden.
This made the project even more vulnerable. It became one of the Biden-era environmental orders that Trump revoked on his first day in office. Trump has also frozen climate spending, began withdrawing the US from major global agreements to tackle climate change, launching attacks on wind energy while sought for the expansion of fossil fuels.
By the end of January, the National Nature Assessment federal webpage had been deleted.
“Nature supports our economy, our health and well-being, national security, and safety from fire and floods,” said Dr. Levin, former director of the report. “The loss of the national natural assessment means we are losing the critical information necessary to ensure nature and people thrive.”
Dr. Levin declined to comment on the future of the report.
The Trump administration had not addressed questions about why it canceled the effort. But White House spokesman Anna Kelly said Trump “unleashes the possibilities of American energy” and “at the same time, our country's land and water will enjoy for the generations to come. I guarantee that we can do it.”
Christopher Shell, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of California, Berkeley and the lead author of the chapter called “Nature and Equity in the United States,” said the focus on environmental justice has made the assessment even more targeted. He said he believes. The Trump administration attacked diversity, equity and inclusion programs and deployed workers from the Office of Environmental Justice during the Environmental Protection Agency holidays.
Biodiversity, the diversity of biological life on Earth, has declined faster than at any point in human history, according to global scientific assessments. The authors stated that the national nature assessment aims to provide a much more robust picture of the state of play in the United States.
Daniel Ignas, an associate professor in the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota and the lead author of the chapter on drivers of natural change, said her team felt the importance of the job more than ever before. Ta.
“To see this is a call for this cause,” Dr. Ignas said. “We're not going to stop.”
