On September 22, 2026 — seventeen months after the Trump administration dismissed nearly 400 volunteer scientists from the nation’s congressionally mandated climate report — 175 of those scientists published their first act of organized resistance: a peer-reviewed roadmap outlining the research priorities that American climate planning will need for years to come. Their paper landed in two journals simultaneously, spans every major dimension of US climate risk, and is open to anyone — no subscription required. It is the opening installment of the U.S. Climate Collection, a distributed, decentralized body of research that the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society are assembling to keep climate science alive outside federal control.

What the Collection is not, however, is a replacement for the National Climate Assessment — and understanding that distinction is exactly what local governments, emergency managers, and infrastructure planners need before deciding how to use it.

What the Administration Dismantled

The National Climate Assessment has been the foundational tool of American climate planning since its first edition in 2000. It is not simply a scientific study. Under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, it is a congressionally mandated, whole-of-government synthesis — coordinated across 13 federal agencies, certified to the standards of the Information Quality Act, reviewed publicly and by the National Academy of Sciences, and delivered to the President and Congress every four years. City engineers, state transportation planners, FEMA regional offices, and insurance actuaries have used it to make specific capital decisions: which coastal roads to elevate, which drainage systems to rebuild, which flood zones to reclassify.

In early April 2025, the Trump administration defunded the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and canceled a contract with ICF International that had provided technical support for the assessment. On April 28, 2025, an email went out to the assessment’s contributors: “At this time, the scope of the NCA6 is currently being reevaluated in accordance with the Global Change Research Act of 1990. We are now releasing all current assessment participants from their roles.” Contributors were dismissed without cause or plan, E&E News reported. On June 30, 2025, the past National Climate Assessments were taken down from federal websites. No replacement site has appeared on NASA’s servers, despite an earlier administration pledge.

“This is as close as it gets to a termination of the assessment,” said Jesse Keenan, a Tulane University professor who specializes in climate adaptation and served as a co-author on the prior NCA. “If you get rid of all the people involved, nothing’s moving forward.”

Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists who was dismissed from the NCA6’s coastal chapter, was more pointed: “Without this information, our country risks flying blind into a world made more dangerous by human-caused climate change.”

The administration’s broader strategy became clearer in July 2025, when the Department of Energy released a climate report written by a secret five-member group of contrarians — the Climate Working Group — whose work the EPA then cited repeatedly to justify repealing the 2009 Endangerment Finding. On January 30, 2026, a federal court ruled that the group’s formation violated federal advisory committee law, which requires transparency and balanced membership in government advisory panels. Released documents showed that administration officials had explicitly discussed using those same contrarians to write the next National Climate Assessment.

What Scientists Built Instead

Four days after the April 28 dismissals, the AGU and AMS responded. They announced a joint special collection — not a government report, but a distributed scientific commons spanning more than 29 peer-reviewed journals, covering all dimensions of US climate science, and open to any researcher who wants to contribute. Fee waivers were offered to ensure financial barriers did not exclude scientists without institutional funding.

“Synthesis papers and other assessment-focused climate research are the backbone of knowledge for public and private decision-making, from city planners to businesses and insurers,” said AGU President Brandon Jones. “This special collection will give that essential work a dedicated home, ensuring it remains rigorous and accessible for years to come.”

AMS President David J. Stensrud acknowledged directly what the Collection cannot do: “While we cannot replace the NCA, we at AMS see it as vital to support and help expand this collaborative scientific effort for the benefit of the U.S. public and the world at large.”

The Collection’s inaugural paper — “Research priorities for robust climate assessments in the United States” — was published September 22, 2026, simultaneously in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and Earth’s Future, an AGU journal. It was authored by 175 volunteers, most of them former contributors to US climate assessment efforts. Lead authors Melissa Kenney (University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment), Robert Kopp (Rutgers University), and Costa Samaras (Carnegie Mellon University) coordinated the effort.

The paper functions as a scientific roadmap — not a summary of existing findings, but a prioritized guide for the research that future assessments will need. Its key themes:

Amplifying climate hazards: How continued greenhouse gas emissions are changing the likelihood, severity, and geographic distribution of extreme weather across different places, timescales, and emissions scenarios.

Compound and cascading extremes: How interacting hazards — simultaneous drought and heat waves, back-to-back hurricane seasons, wildfire compounding on drought — affect infrastructure and institutions designed around a more stable climate.

Climate and social systems: How human behavior, governance, and institutional capacity shape the distribution of climate impacts and the feasibility of effective responses.

Integrated climate responses: How mitigation, adaptation, disaster management, and resilience strategies interact — including their tradeoffs, co-benefits, and unintended consequences.

“As climate risks escalate, the need for rigorous scientific assessments and the syntheses and other research that inform them has never been greater,” Kenney, Kopp, and Samaras said in a statement to AMS. “The most recent U.S. national climate assessment was published in 2023, and the scientific understanding has advanced significantly over the last several years.”

What the Collection Cannot Do

Here is the gap no press release has adequately addressed.

The National Climate Assessment was not simply a large pile of peer-reviewed papers. It was an integrated synthesis — a product structured specifically for decision-makers who are not climate scientists: an infrastructure planner in Miami comparing flood projections for different sea-level-rise scenarios; a state emergency manager in Phoenix modeling heat mortality under different emissions pathways; a county planner in rural Kentucky assessing how shifting precipitation patterns will affect reservoir capacity over a 30-year capital cycle.

The NCA’s synthesized structure — its regional breakdowns, its sector-specific risk tables, its explicit uncertainty ranges — was what made it usable for those audiences without additional expert intermediation. A collection of peer-reviewed papers spanning 29 journals is scientifically rigorous, but it is not self-synthesizing. A city planner trying to use it must either hire a climate scientist to read and integrate the relevant papers, or wait for someone else to produce the integrated assessment that the papers are intended to inform.

Chris Field, a professor of environmental studies at Stanford University who has long engaged with climate assessment work, captured the problem: “Not having the NCA is like driving a car with a dirty windshield. It is hard to detect risks until they unfold as disasters.”

The U.S. Climate Collection addresses the supply of scientific research. It does not, by design, address the synthesis gap — the step between a body of peer-reviewed literature and a decision-ready document that a non-specialist can use to set infrastructure priorities or insurance rates. That gap remains open.

AGU and AMS have acknowledged this, describing the Collection as “foundational, peer-reviewed synthesis research to support this network of climate assessment efforts” — not as the assessment itself. Whether states, regions, or sectors will commission their own synthesis efforts drawing on Collection papers remains to be seen.

What Remains Legally Unresolved

The administration’s actions have not gone unchallenged in court. The January 2026 FACA ruling adds significant legal pressure on the administration’s broader effort to produce a politically friendly alternative NCA. Legal scholars at the Sabin Center for Climate Law have noted that the Global Change Research Act makes the NCA mandatory — and that prior judicial precedent, including Center for Biological Diversity v. Brennan from 2007, stopped a prior administration from altering the assessment process without going through proper legal channels. Whether those arguments will be brought to bear on NCA6 specifically is unclear.

Meanwhile, California and a coalition of other states filed suit against the EPA over its repeal of the Endangerment Finding — the 2009 scientific determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health — in March 2026, arguing the move violates established law.

What Planners and Governments Should Do Now

For state and local decision-makers navigating this landscape, the practical guidance is the following: the U.S. Climate Collection at usclimatecollection.org is a legitimate, peer-reviewed scientific resource. Papers published there can be cited in planning documents, used to ground risk assessments, and accessed without cost or institutional affiliation. It is a better scientific resource than nothing, and it will grow.

But communities that previously used the NCA to make integrated, cross-sector climate planning decisions will still face a synthesis gap. Regional climate science centers, state climatologist offices, and university-based research programs are among the best available intermediaries. The Collection’s own published roadmap explicitly frames itself as input to “a network of climate assessment efforts” at the local, regional, and sectoral level — which is an invitation for those entities to organize around it.

The administration has also not formally abandoned its legal obligation to produce the NCA. What a future, administration-revised NCA might say — and whether it will meet the scientific standards of its predecessors — is among the most significant unanswered questions in US climate policy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the U.S. Climate Collection, and how is it different from the National Climate Assessment?

The U.S. Climate Collection is a joint initiative of the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society that publishes peer-reviewed research papers on US climate risks and solutions across more than 29 scientific journals, all open-access and free to read. The National Climate Assessment is a different kind of product: a congressionally mandated, whole-of-government integrated synthesis, certified to federal information quality standards, designed specifically for decision-makers who need a unified picture of regional climate risks across multiple sectors. The Collection provides scientific inputs that could inform future assessments; it does not itself produce the synthesized, decision-ready document that the NCA was. Both AGU and AMS have been explicit that the Collection is not a replacement for the NCA.

Why did the Trump administration dismiss the NCA6 authors, and is that legal?

The administration told contributors the NCA6’s “scope is being reevaluated.” The Project 2025 blueprint authored by OMB Director Russ Vought explicitly called for eliminating the USGCRP so its work could not be used to support climate regulations in court. Legal scholars at institutions including the Columbia University Sabin Center note the Global Change Research Act of 1990 makes the assessment mandatory, and that courts have previously intervened when administrations attempted to alter the process without legal authority. The administration’s secret Climate Working Group — which it created to produce a politically aligned alternative climate report — was ruled a FACA violation by a federal court on January 30, 2026.

What should a city planner or state official use for climate planning now?

The U.S. Climate Collection at usclimatecollection.org is a peer-reviewed, open-access resource that can be used to ground climate risk assessments and planning documents. However, its papers are scientific research, not integrated decision-making tools — using them requires either climate expertise or additional synthesis. State climatologist offices, regional climate science centers, and university extension programs are the best intermediaries for translating Collection research into actionable planning guidance. Some states have also developed their own climate assessment processes that are now effectively independent of the federal government.

Is there any chance the federal government will produce a legitimate NCA6?

The legal obligation exists and has not been repealed — only Congress could eliminate it. What an administration-revised NCA6 would contain, and whether it would meet the scientific standards that made prior editions trustworthy, is unknown. The administration’s use of climate contrarians to write the DOE’s Climate Working Group report — later ruled an illegal process — demonstrates the risk that a politically directed NCA could serve political rather than scientific purposes. The scientific community’s response, including the U.S. Climate Collection, is in part a hedge against that outcome: ensuring that credible, peer-reviewed climate science exists in the public domain regardless of what the federal process produces.