5 12 25 1 19 PM ‘Digital ark’ set to safeguard climate data from Trump Search Global Africa Asia SDGs Edtech AI Commentary InDepth HE Jobs Partnerships Search About Us CANADA-UNITED STATES ‘Digital ark’ set to safeguard climate data from Trump Nathan M Greenfield  12 May 2025 Share Image iStock Join us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Related Links UNITED STATES Urgent action is needed to curb Trump’s anti-climate agenda UNITED STATES Universities can expect a frontal attack if Trump returns GLOBAL Universities must challenge US Congress on climate change – Kerry UNITED STATES Universities defy Trump and sign up to climate action Featured Employers Post Share 0 In the weeks following the re-election of President Donald J Trump – who had made clear his intent to defund large swaths of America’s scientific infrastructure especially anything to do with climate science – a team of computer scientists and management students in Montréal Québec rushed to put the finishing touches to a central repository for climate research data and other sustainability-related information The Sustainability Academic Network or SUSAN was conceived a year and a half ago as a one-stop multifaceted platform where researchers could find information on the impact of climate change on forests rivers and cities and on plastics in the oceans and industrial greenhouse gas emissions as well as research funding sources With Trump’s return to power McGill University Professor Juan C Serpa who leads the team of faculty and students added another mission to SUSAN’s to-do list “Protect scientific data in the United States from disappearing ” According to an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists during Trump’s first administration 26% of US government websites with terms like “climate change” “clean energy” and “adaptation” went dark “The day after the 2024 inauguration the administration took down the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool – a map that had layers of information from multiple agencies about climate and economic vulnerabilities ” writes Jessica McKenzie for the Bulletin Since then thousands of URLs for thousands of datasets in all areas of science now lead only to the ‘404 Error’ Featured HE Jobs “We’re really losing our history here we’re losing our environmental history ” Rachel Santarsiero director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project housed at George Washington University Washington DC told the Bulletin in early March Mathematics Visiting Adjunct Teaching Professor or Lecturer Also in March Forbes magazine reported that other data that has disappeared from US government websites includes the National Ocean and Atmospheric Agency’s Climate Data Computer Science - Open Rank Faculty Also missing is the Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool which provided access to the Environmental Protection Agency’s data on “pollution exposure and racial disparities” https www universityworldnews com post php story 20250512102627549 1 4 5 12 25 1 19 PM Machine Learning - Open Rank Faculty Computational Biology Open Rank Faculty Positions Philosophy Visiting Adjunct Teaching Professor or Lecturer Business and Economics Open Rank Teaching Faculty Artificial Intelligence in Action - Open Rank Faculty English Composition - Open Rank Teaching Faculty Computer Vision - Open Rank Faculty ‘Digital ark’ set to safeguard climate data from Trump Collective impact Raised in Colombia Serpa is fully aware that the word ‘disappeared’ is redolent of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 which he read as a young teen and Stalinist Russia Serpa immigrated to Canada at the age of 18 to live in a hippie commune in Ontario with the intention of returning to Colombia “You could say that my dream was to become a left-wing social leader and go back to Colombia ” he said At the time Colombia was in the grip of a decades-old civil war chiefly between the right-wing governments and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC The war ended with a peace agreement signed in 2016 Now a tenured professor at McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management Serpa sees SUSAN as a mature version of his teenage belief that grassroots politics could be used to create collective impact in an effort to avert climate catastrophe or as he put it “doomsday” “This is what scares me We’re at a time when we have no time to lose And right now we have a mixture of very dark political times – just when we need the most cooperation to deal with climate change ” While the 50 or so bachelor masters and PhD students Serpa directs are connected with McGill the university does not fund the SUSAN project Funding comes from private sources and grants though the bulk of the labour is volunteered “We’re software developers and our work starts after our day jobs at 11 pm because we are working with people in India ” said Serpa To gather the links to the datasets that are being preserved in what amounts to a digital ark Serpa has sent out thousands of emails to professors and researchers asking them to link their data “I thought I was going to be the biggest spammer in academia ” he noted Undoing the siloes SUSAN which was accessed by 39 000 researchers last week can be thought of as a LinkedIn of sustainability for academics but one organised on very different principles than those of academia “At universities we're organising ways to think of disciplines and fields Professors are in buildings called ‘Business’ ‘Medical’ ‘Engineering’ These are the silos we create “But climate change solutions and sustainability are solutions that actually need the collaboration of researchers in different disciplines There's not a sustainability or climate change school barring a few examples ” he said To achieve a de-siloed database Serpa and his team determined 60 themes including natural disasters sustainable tourism supply chains biofuels hydro and tidal power pest management and wind energy These were fed into an AI system which then read 400 000 articles and linked them through these themes which were then grouped together under five main categories economic sustainability environmental sustainability governance and policy social sustainability and technology and innovation “The problem was that we had all of these resources fragmented throughout the world and we wanted to put them all in one place so that we could communicate and collaborate better This will generate more efficient research on climate change ” Serpa said https www universityworldnews com post php story 20250512102627549 2 4 5 12 25 1 19 PM ‘Digital ark’ set to safeguard climate data from Trump SUSAN does not house the project’s 4 000 datasets but works as a curated directory The data remains where the researchers have placed it for safekeeping or where it has been salvaged by organisations such as the Environmental Data Governance Initiative Source Cooperation and Social Explorer The latter according to Forbes had by early March already salvaged “over 11 000 web pages and countless datasets from federal agencies” SUSAN routes links researchers to where the data can be accessed Doing things differently Sponsored Article True to his youthful belief in social collectivism Serpa told University World News that he sees SUSAN as an alternative to the academic system of publish or perish where a professor’s success is measured by the number of articles they publish and the number of times they are cited in prestigious journals In his own field of business technology and innovation “the world is moving so fast that we cannot keep up with the publications while the writing of articles is a very slow model which is something I’ve written on ” he says “With SUSAN ” Serpa explained “I wanted to do something to connect people and do things differently But I had the support of my dean and I had tenure Thanks to that I was able to get SUSAN started ” Professional women who break barriers and empower others Sponsored Article 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