What Trump’s cuts to federal climate research could mean for Illinois
[May 10, 2025]
By Isabella Schoonover and Medill Illinois News Bureau
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.
[to top of second column]
|
Shelf cloud over Northwest Illinois. (Photo by Janice Thompson, NOAA
National Weather Service (NWS) Collection, CC BY 2.0)
“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. |
