The Trump administration prevented NASA’s chief scientist from travelling to climate talks where she was to co-chair a working group.Credit: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty
A major United Nations climate assessment is moving forwards in China this week without the United States, after the administration of President Donald Trump blocked US officials’ participation and shut down a team providing technical support for the next international climate assessment.
Reports emerged last week that the Trump administration had banned NASA chief scientist Katherine Calvin from attending a planning meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that began on Monday in Hangzhou, China. Nature has now confirmed with several sources that the US State Department delegation is not attending the meeting, which is slated to end with the adoption of an outline for the panel’s seventh climate assessment, due for completion by late 2029. The IPCC assessments, which are the gold-standard guide to the pace and effects of climate change, are used by governments to shape their climate policies.
What Trump’s flurry of executive orders means for science
NASA has also cancelled a contract that funded a team including scientists and others to provide administrative and technical support to the climate-assessment effort, according to a US official who is familiar with the situation but asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the press. The team would have supported Calvin and her co-chair, Joy Jacqueline Pereira, a geologist at the University Kebangsaan Malaysia in Bangi. The cancellation was reported by the Washington Post and independently confirmed by Nature. A NASA spokesperson said that the move was prompted by guidance “to eliminate non-essential consulting contracts”.
The absence of the US delegation from the meeting “is obviously a loss for the international community,” says Li Shuo, the director of the Asia Society Policy Institute’s China Climate Hub in Washington DC. “The US plays an important role in the IPCC process, contributing both financial and intellectual support.”
IPCC spokesperson Andrej Mahecic declined to comment, except to say that the United States has not notified the organization of any decisions regarding participation in this week’s meeting or the broader climate assessment. For now, the process is moving forwards, Mahecic says. NASA officials confirmed that Calvin would not be attending the meeting in China but declined to make her available for an interview. The White House referred Nature‘s queries to the State Department; officials there declined to comment.
Outsized role
The United States has historically made substantial scientific and monetary contributions to the IPCC. US scientists publish research that informs the assessment and run computer simulations of the climate that feed into it. For the seventh report, Calvin was co-chairing one of three IPCC working groups; hers was assessing the scientific literature on options to reduce emissions and halt global warming.
Calvin’s support team would have helped with everything from reviewing the literature and designing graphics to managing travel logistics. The group was funded by a NASA contract but situated in the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a White House organization that coordinates climate work across federal agencies. That contract has now been ended, according to the US official. “We don’t know if Kate will be allowed to continue as a co-chair” of the working group, they said.
“It would be a real shame if the administration pulled Kate out of that role, not just for her, but for the US,” says Andy Miller, who was one of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s liaisons to the USGCRP until his retirement in December. “And it would be a loss for IPCC to lose someone of Kate’s caliber.”
