This week the Trump administration said it would stop funding the Arctic Report Card, PBS NewsHour reported, the annual federal assessment of a region warming faster than anywhere else on Earth [1]. The report is not a fringe product. NOAA's own program page describes it as a document "issued annually since 2006," a "peer-reviewed source for clear, reliable and concise environmental information on the current state of different components of the Arctic environmental system relative to historical records," and notes it is "now in its 20th year" [2].
It is also an international effort. Twila Moon, a glaciologist and the report's lead editor, told PBS that "we have usually more than 100 authors from a dozen countries," adding, "this is an international effort" [1]. NOAA lists its audience as "scientists, teachers, students, decision-makers and the general public interested in the Arctic environment and science" [2].
What the report does, in Moon's telling, is translate. "The simple existence of data does not mean that people are finding that data and being able to access it, use it, and understand what it means," she said [1]. The report, she said, has "played a really important role in bridging the gap between raw data, which is really difficult for most people to understand or work with, towards something that can serve nonscientists so that they can be making good decisions with proper, up-to-date environmental awareness" [1].
Moon was emphatic that this is a record, not a prediction. "The Arctic Report Card and all of the science that we're reporting in it is specifically emphasizing direct observations of changes," she said, describing it as "a resource that is providing real, accurate, and complete, peer-reviewed, trustworthy information about what is actually happening in place" [1]. Her line on the politics of that was blunt: "It's not a political position. It's a scientific resource" [1].
The changes it tracks do not stay put. "What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic," Moon said, explaining that shifts in permafrost and in the sea ice that forms on the Arctic Ocean "actually themselves influence the weather we experience down here in the Lower 48" [1]. She also noted the region has "become a U.S. administration priority in regards to paying attention to security, international relations, changes with shipping, and also economic development in the area" [1].
Moon said the editors and authors would try to keep the work going in some form, but she warned against assuming a clean substitute. Producing it elsewhere, she said, "does not mean that it's going to have the depth, all of the resources and tools that people expect," calling it "a real loss in moving this to being something that's no longer supported by NOAA, where we have spent two decades building tools, resources, and a really trusted resource for folks" [1]. She said she still holds "hope that we may still have a pathway to see the Arctic Report Card as a NOAA report," while pledging the team would work "to ensure that this data is getting to those people who need it" in Alaska and beyond [1].
