It’s been a tough year for scientists.
The Trump administration has canceled or cut billions of dollars in funding for projects it considers counter to its policies, including green energy and climate change.
In Indiana, that’s resulted in about $141 million in terminated grants, according to the tracking site Grant Witness.
The biggest losses were two clean energy grants meant to help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, the main cause of accelerated climate change. A $117 million grant could have spurred solar energy projects throughout the state, and a $6.7 million grant would have built more solar panels at the Indianapolis International Airport.
Besides making it more difficult to establish clean energy in the state, the Trump administration is also making it harder for Hoosiers to know how much climate change is affecting them.
Trump has allowed federal agencies to roll back greenhouse gas regulations and reporting and scrubbed mentions of climate change from many agency websites.
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The Trump administration not only stopped work on the National Climate Assessment, a major federal report that collected research on how climate change affects the U.S., but also made it difficult to access its information.
These decisions could have drastic consequences for Indianapolis and other communities around the state that use information such as temperature and precipitation projections to make policy decisions.
But national science organizations are teaming up to fill in the gap left by the federal government and collect climate research in a free database available to everyone.
IU Indianapolis professor Gabriel Filippelli, who is also editor-in-chief of the environmental and health science journal GeoHealth, said the effort will help keep the information up to date for anyone who needs it.
“With the federal government backing out, it’s basically all hands on deck to come together to try to archive and collect this valuable information that otherwise would likely be lost,” he said.
How climate science is useful to cities
The Fifth National Climate Assessment, released in 2023, found that climate change has made the Midwest hotter and wetter. Those changes have impacted agriculture, natural resources, health, cities, transportation, water quality and many other facets of life.
Local governments throughout Indianapolis use data from the report to plan how to use their resources.
“These types of plans and assessments are dense with information specific to Indianapolis and help agencies make data-driven decisions to prioritize certain policies and services,” said Indianapolis Office of Sustainability project manager Lindsay Trameri.
Purdue University led an effort to understand climate change effects in Indiana in 2018, called the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment, but the research is now close to a decade old.
The Trump administration’s choice to stop backing the national report puts local governments at risk of making decisions based on outdated science. They use climate predictions to determine how much money to budget for mosquito control, for example, and where to build splash pads, plant trees or build levees.
Filippelli, who is also the executive director of IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute, said the long-term projections for how heat and precipitation affect cities are the most likely to change over the years.
Filling the science gap
The Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires the federal government to submit a report on the effects of climate change at least every four years.
The next National Climate Assessment is due by 2027, But in April, the Trump administration dismissed scientists who contributed to the report.
That makes it unlikely the federal government will be able to meet the deadline with an entirely updated report. It will also make creating future reports more difficult.
“When you dismantle that, you’re also dismantling an entire system that had been put in place over a couple of decades with largely volunteer labor from scientists,” Filippelli said. “That leaves a lot of organizations in the lurch.”
“With the federal government backing out, it’s basically all hands on deck to come together to try to archive and collect this valuable information that otherwise would likely be lost.”
— Gabriel Filippelli, IU Indianapolis professor
To overcome that, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society created the U.S. Climate Collection, a free repository of climate science research.
Scientists can submit research for peer review, and, if accepted, the work will be published in one of three dozen journals and on the U.S. Climate Collection website.
For more information, check out the U.S. Climate collection website.
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Mirror Indy reporter Enrique Saenz covers west Indianapolis. Contact him at 317-983-4203 or enrique.saenz@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on Bluesky at @enriquesaenz.bsky.social.
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