Editorial: Loss of research funds threat to climate resilience

By The Herald Editorial Board

Memories for many remain fresh of the 2021 Northwest Heat Dome, a record-breaking stretch of extreme heat between June 27 and July 3 that year where temperatures throughout the Pacific Northwest hit 100 degrees F and hotter, resulting in wide-spread economic losses, thousands sickened by heat-related illnesses and more than 400 deaths in Washington state alone.

Some fortunate timing and the earlier recognition of the changing climate in the Northwest allowed quick action by the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group, a team of researchers that for more than 25 years has supported and advised science-based efforts to adapt to climate change across the Northwest. Prior to the heat dome that year, the UW group was awarded a federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grant that allowed the CIG to open its Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative, one of 11 such regional centers across the nation, tasked with finding practical solutions for communities to the impacts of the nation’s changing climate.

Quick action on heat dome: The new collaborative quickly started work that resulted in a special report, “In The Hot Seat: Saving Lives from Extreme Heat in Washington State.”

The report, said Jason Vogel, deputy director of the Climate Impacts Group, was deep research into who was vulnerable to extreme heat events and what could be done to prepare for future heat events.

“Like, what were the failures and what would be the leverage points where we could actually save lives and reduce illness if we did action A versus action B versus action C?” Vogel said in an interview this week.

Following up on the study, that research informed efforts with the state Department of Health and others to recommend a suite of initiatives to protect state residents that were then mandated by the state Legislature.

Until earlier this month Vogel was also director of the climate collaborative. That ended May 5 when NOAA’s grants division notified the program that its five-year grant funding — already threatened by planned budget cuts in Congress — had been terminated, effective immediately.

The Northwest program and a second similar but unidentified program were cut. The remaining nine, for now, have kept their funding, but would lose future NOAA grants under terms of President Trump’s proposed budget.

Three of the Northwest collaborative’s staff have been laid off, and the jobs of three others, predominately funded by the $1 million a year grant, are also threatened, Vogel said.

What was lost: With the loss of the grant funding go projects already planned and underway throughout the Northwest, he said, including work with coastal Indian tribes in Washington and Oregon adapting to sea level rise and erosion of land; air-quality monitoring and solutions for tribes and communities coping with regular inundations of wildfire smoke; and rural communities in Washington and Idaho facing a loss of farmland because of drought and heat and the threat of the land’s conversion from agricultural uses.

“We were trying to capture those stories and raise awareness so that we could help those communities lobby to protect their way of life,” Vogel said.

The Climate Impacts Group can continue its work, thanks to existing state and other funding, but the loss of the NOAA grant represents about a quarter of its budget, and is not easily replaced. The UW researchers, at the start of the year, were hopeful about prospects for a $750,000 annual state grant that would have expanded the work of the resilience collaborative; those hopes ended with the Legislature’s struggle to close a significant budget gap this year.

Nor is Vogel putting much hope in successful legal challenges to the loss of grants, even though the funding through 2026 had already been appropriated by Congress. The full range of scientific research at the UW, as with research at universities across the nation, is under attack, making prioritization of such challenges difficult.

“They’ve got one-hundred fires to put out on any given day, and we were just one of them,” he said.

‘A mosaic of cruelty’: In an email to supporters, Vogel called the loss of the federal resilience funding “a slow-motion tragedy.”

“Each single action of this administration taken alone appears small, but each action is one story in a mosaic of chaos and cruelty in the United States today,” he wrote.

Among the shattered pieces of that mosaic:

• The Trump administration’s second retreat from the Paris Climate Agreement; its cancellation of $8 billion in clean energy projects and actions to undo existing rules to protect clean air and water.

• The administration’s threats to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its assistance to communities following climate and other disasters, along with it the cancellation of FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, which was funding $3.6 billion in community climate resilience projects across the U.S.

• The administration’s recent order to NOAA’s scientists to end updates to a long-running list of annual weather disasters that have exceeded $1 billion in losses. That record-keeping had shown a toll of economic losses — as well as deaths — that were ramping up with every passing year. Such annual losses averaged $22.2 billion during the 1980s, $34 billion during the 1990s, $62.8 billion in the 2000s, $100.6 billion in the 2010s, and more than $151 billion in just the five years between 2020 and 2024.

The greater loss: More than a simple denial of the climate crisis, the Trump administration’s agenda is ending federal support of valuable work, discouraging and penalizing others’ investments in that work, and now even blinding the nation to the ever-worsening threat posed by greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting warming of the planet.

The elimination of grant funding is about more than the loss of jobs for scientists and researchers, but the loss of the resulting work that promised to help communities.

“That’s the tragedy of this,” Vogel said. “Those extreme events and the real human toll of those events is going to continue. And it’s only going to get worse, and now we don’t have the resources to try and help local communities, the state and individual citizens figure out what they can do to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their way of life.”