Concern as Trump administration ends two decades of Arctic monitoring  – EnviroNews

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The Trump administration has announced that it will end federal support for NOAA’s annual Arctic Report Card, which has provided critical reporting on the state of the region for more than 20 years.

In 2025, the report found that temperatures were the warmest recorded since 1990 and that the Arctic’s annual temperatures increased at more than double the global rate since 2006, faster than anywhere else in the world. The move comes as rising global temperatures fuel record-breaking heatwaves in the ocean and communities globally.

A peer-reviewed report, the Arctic Report Card has provided climate scientists, policymakers and the public with the latest findings on the state of the Arctic environment upon its publication each December. The upcoming, 21st edition of the Report Card is already in process, and the sources said it is now up to the lead authors, together with chapter authors and other subject matter experts involved with it, to try to figure out how to still carry it forward.

The report takes an Arctic-wide view of the rapidly changing environment in the region, which is warming at about three times the rate of the rest of the globe. But while it contains an abundance of climate science findings, such as on the state of Arctic sea ice, it is not exclusively a climate change report – rather it has been known as a compendium of timely knowledge on the Arctic, from its plants and animals to the changing way of life for the people who live there.

The withdrawal of support for the Arctic report continues the Trump administration’s pattern of canceling climate programmes, distorting the science and restricting the public’s access to it.

For example, NOAA no longer produces an annual report on billion-dollar disasters or updates that database. It also dismissed all the authors working on the Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment to start anew with its own set of authors who have questioned or rejected some of the widely accepted scientific findings on human-caused climate change.

The administration also halted updates to climate.gov, providing no new official information there on everything from El Niño to global warming.

In response to the development, Wáahlaal Gíidaak, Ocean Conservancy’s Vice President of Arctic and Northern Waters, stated: “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. Its rapid warming has profound consequences for Arctic communities, ocean health and our global climate.

“We are already seeing the devastating impacts of extreme heat around the world, and those changes are even more pronounced in our ocean, which acts as a global heat sink. We cannot afford to look away from what is happening in the Arctic or stop measuring it. We should continue to fund critical NOAA programmes, such as the report card, which are essential to protecting our ocean and keeping Americans safe.”