CHICAGO — The Trump administration took the unprecedented step of halting work on the next National Climate Assessment last week, dismissing all 400 volunteer scientists who were tasked with writing the new version of the report.
Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford was among those dismissed in his volunteer capacity with the federal program. On April 28, Ford and his colleagues received an email saying the upcoming Sixth National Climate Assessment, due to be released in 2027, is “currently being reevaluated in accordance with the Global Change Research Act of 1990.”
The Global Change Research Act mandates that the National Climate Assessment be published every four years to inform the public of the ongoing impacts, risks and responses to climate change. In the last 35 years, the federal government has never failed to publish the nation’s preeminent report on climate change, but its fate was brought into question last month when it was reported that NASA canceled a critical contract for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which oversees the assessment.
“It’s disappointing from a personal standpoint,” said Ford, who served as a technical contributor to the Fifth National Climate Assessment published in 2023. He said he was looking forward to taking on a larger role as an author of the Midwest chapter in the next report, which was due in 2027.
He and the other authors of the Midwest chapter had already begun planning what topics the next report should focus on, like the effects of extreme heat on farmers and farm workers, livestock and even mental health, “something that the Midwest chapter hadn’t done previously,” Ford said.
Illinois researchers have always played a role in the National Climate Assessment. University of Illinois emeritus professor Donald Wuebbles has contributed to all five previous reports, including serving as a lead author of the fourth assessment in 2017.
He said his greatest concern is that the report could now move forward under a different team of scientists hand-picked by President Donald Trump, who has a history of denying climate change as a “hoax.”
“There’s a group of denialists out there,” Wuebbles said. “They let their politics affect their science.”
The National Climate Assessment is meant to help policymakers understand the immediate threats of rising global temperatures to the environment in their region and implement solutions at the local level.
“Almost all impacts of climate change are local,” Ford said.
In Illinois, those impacts include heavy rainfall and flooding, heat waves and drought in the summer, and natural disasters like tornadoes, which can lead people to become displaced and cost the state billions of dollars in damage, according to Ford.
A 2021 Illinois climate change assessment, which Wuebbles led and Ford co-authored, cites extreme flooding in the spring of 2019 as an example of how climate change is already impacting Illinois. Crop yield losses that year led to a record number of Prevented Plant claims and crop insurance payouts to farmers by the state. Similar events are expected to occur more often and with more intensity if global temperatures continue to increase at the current rate, the 2021 assessment found.
“Climate change isn’t going to stop by ignoring it,” Ford said. “If we don’t have the assessment, we don’t know what to expect, and therefore we can’t plan. Is it (climate change) going to cost $5 billion to the economy, or is it going to be $10 billion?”
The Trump administration is reportedly not going to track the cost of major natural disasters any longer.
Ford shared Wuebbles’ concerns that the next assessment, if published, could be influenced by Trump’s anti-climate change regulation agenda. He also said without the involvement of a diverse group of researchers, the next assessment could fail to represent the interests of the states.
“We are, as experts, tasked with assessing what kinds of problems and solutions are worth including in the National Climate Assessment,” Ford said. “But if this is being disbanded, who’s going to be leading this?… Probably not people from Illinois.”
Trump’s White House has fueled these concerns, saying climate change regulations threaten the president’s goal of “unleashing American energy.” He described state and local climate policies as “burdensome and ideologically motivated,” saying they” “threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.”
This is paired with a recent move by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zelden to repeal the endangerment finding of 2009, the agency’s official recognition of greenhouse gases as harmful to human health and the planet.
Proposed Illinois legislation could fill gaps in research
Amid national setbacks to climate change research and environmental policy, Illinois lawmakers are continuing to advance progressive climate legislation at the state level, such as Illinois Senate Bill 1859, referred to as the Climate Displacement Act. That measure cleared the state Senate and is awaiting action in the House.
If passed, the act would establish a state task force to assess and provide recommendations for how Illinois can prepare for the impacts of climate change — specifically, an anticipated influx of climate-displaced people moving to the Midwest from other parts of the U.S.
Sponsors say the bill was informed by the Fifth National Climate Assessment, which projected a trend of increased migration of people away from coastal areas over the next 20-30 years, due to greater frequency of natural disasters. The task force would evaluate ways Illinois might proactively respond, and what the cost burden of that response would be. An initial report of its findings would be due in 2026.
“There’s not a lot of states that are proactively doing this kind of planning despite, you know, the looming danger,” said Senate bill sponsor Sen. Graciela Guzmán, D-Chicago.
Rep. Blaine Wilhour, R-Beecher City, criticized the measure in an Energy and Environment committee hearing.
“Is this task force going to study the outmigration as a result of some of our climate policies in this state, specifically the outmigration of good union jobs?” he asked.
House bill sponsor Rep. Will Guzzardi, D-Chicago, said the proposed task force would work to project those trends. Wilhour said if the task force were to include relevant union stakeholders, he would consider supporting the bill.
The bill passed the House Energy and Environment Committee, and now moves to the House floor.
Illinois has a track record of enacting progressive climate policies, which Ford said is the silver lining to an otherwise difficult situation for climate scientists.
“They don’t have to follow the science,” he said. “But they’re at least informed by the science at the state level in Illinois. We’re at least doing that.”
Isabella Schoonover is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.