Federal funding for the next US National Climate Assessment was cut and hundreds of contributing authors were removed, and two scientific societies have started a community effort to replace the assessment’s coordinating role. The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society announced a central collection where researchers can deposit work that would have fed a national report and regional analyses.
The new US Climate Collection does not try to recreate the old programme’s editorial machine. Rather than organising one large, coordinated synthesis, the project invites independent teams to publish peer-reviewed studies in scientific journals, and then aggregates those papers in a searchable resource for future report-writers. The societies describe the approach as a modular way to preserve and surface evidence that would otherwise have been channelled through the cancelled federal process.
The collection’s first entry is a roadmap paper authored by 175 scientists, many of whom had been contributing to the planned federal assessment. That manuscript is being published simultaneously in journals operated by the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. Organisers say the paper’s purpose is to set priorities that will guide subsequent research contributions added to the central repository.
The intervention addresses several immediate problems created when federal agencies removed past reports from official sites and eliminated funding for the US Global Change Research Program. Those removals left datasets and syntheses scattered, and they interrupted a legally mandated cycle of national climate reporting. By creating a community-curated library of peer-reviewed studies, the societies aim to give future authors a consolidated evidence base even without the original federal coordination.
What follows is an open call to researchers, who must now choose peer-reviewed journals as the primary publishing route if they want work to appear in the collection. The first roadmap paper will serve as a template for topics and methods the collection prioritises, and it sets the baseline for how the community intends to rebuild a dispersed assessment capability outside the traditional federal structure.
