Robust environmental and public health protections depend on quality data.

No single organization has the federal government’s resources to assemble and maintain as much data from thousands of sources. For this reason, Congress has consistently required federal agencies to collect and publish nationwide data on a range of issues, including communities’ exposure to climate-related hazards, toxic air pollution, and opportunities to mitigate transit-related greenhouse gas emissions, to name a few.

This information, in turn, supports crucial governmental functions to protect the environment and public health. For example, federal laws demand that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) use the “best available science” when determining the amount of pollution that factories may emit or discharge into public waters. Regulators depend on those data to justify more protective standards. Communities and policymakers make pivotal funding, planning, and advocacy decisions based, in part, on federal data showing where people live and the climate and environmental harms to which they are exposed.

During the first Trump administration, Harvard Law School’s Environmental & Energy Law Program documented efforts across the federal government to undermine agencies’ scientific and expert capacities, including terminating the collection of essential environmental and public health data. After President Trump won reelection in November, we worked with our colleagues as part of a Salata Institute-funded interdisciplinary research cluster to identify and preserve key federal datasets monitoring environmental pollution, health, and climate change.

Though informal at first, we soon joined a broader coalition of academic and nonprofit organizations – Public Environmental Data Partners – to preserve public access to this federal data. Led by pre-doctoral fellows Ana Martinez and Dylan Carlson Sirvent León, the Harvard team quickly uploaded hundreds of files from EPA, the Department of Energy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and others to Harvard’s Dataverse as part of the Harvard Environment and Law Data (HELD) collection. Martinez and Carlson Sirvent León put other projects on hold to capture priority information based on feedback from scientists, practitioners, and attorneys. In Martinez’s words, “it was a sprint.”

“The disappearance of taxpayer-funded, expert-produced, science-backed data from so many government websites is, as our colleague Nancy Krieger called it, a ‘digital book burning’,” explained our cluster’s principal investigator, Jason Beckfield. “Whether or not you call what’s happening ‘climate change,’ practitioners need these valuable data to plan for rising seas and extreme weather events.” 

While the HELD collection is focused on raw data and policy resources, other members of Public Environmental Data Partners are working to recreate the user interface for key mapping tools. These efforts have gained national press, including in the New York Times and New Yorker. One member also created a Federal Environmental Web Tracker to document when online federal resources are changed or deleted. 

To date, visitors to the HELD collection have downloaded over 2 million files. Many of the datasets preserved in the HELD Collection, like DOE’s Energy Justice Dashboard, were built or expanded under the Biden administration to highlight how certain communities in the U.S. bear the brunt of environmental pollution or energy costs, and the resulting health and economic harms. Though these datasets are no longer being maintained and updated by DOE, they continue to inform state and local governments’ funding and energy-efficiency programs. The HELD collection also includes key federal enforcement or regulatory dockets, including EPA’s civil rights enforcement docket or PM2.5 (soot) rulemaking, to preserve modeling, scientific assessments, enforcement letters, and other documents essential to advancing public health protections in the future.

One professional using these datasets is Ryan Hathaway, former director of environmental justice at the White House who now works with the nonprofit Lawyers for Good Government providing pro-bono support to help hundreds of organizations across the U.S. who have had their federal funding paused or terminated.

“When we partner with our colleagues in education and science, that lowers the bar for communities that are trying to tell their story and get help,” Hathaway said.

We’re no substitute

Though these efforts to preserve data are important, they can never replace the role of the federal government in collecting and maintaining accurate data. Federal agencies have already removed crucial datasets and research tools from their websites and paused or terminated funding for external research on climate change, environmental justice, and other pressing issues.

Failure to collect and maintain the best available data on these and other issues jeopardizes efforts by states and other stakeholders to safeguard communities’ health, enforce environmental and public health protections, and mitigate future risks due to climate change.  

Written with support from Ana Martinez and Dylan Carlson Sirvent León. For monthly updates from the Environmental & Energy Law Program’s Environmental Justice and Regulatory Trackers, sign up for their newsletter. 

All perspectives expressed in the Harvard Climate Blog are those of the authors and not of Harvard University or the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. Any errors are the authors’ own. The Harvard Climate Blog is edited by an interdisciplinary team of Harvard faculty.