Volunteers Are Protecting Access to Climate and Environmental Justice Data From Trump’s Website Wipe
The Trump Administration is trying to wipe governmental websites clean of data showing how climate change and the impacts of pollution hit poor and minority communities hardest. Networks of tech-savvy volunteers are diving in to keep vital information accessible to the public.
“In the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites, and more are feared to be at risk of deletion. While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed,” reports the New York Times. “But now, hundreds of volunteers are working to collect and download as much government data as possible and to recreate the digital tools that allow the public to access that information.”
The Organization Saving this Data
These volunteers are part of a project called Public Environmental Data Partners. They’ve retrieved links to more than 100 data sets that have been removed from government websites, and have a growing list of 300 more they hope to preserve.
“To gather insights on what data to preserve, we reached out to our networks, which consist largely of environmental justice groups and networks, state and local government climate offices, and academic researchers,” says the group on its website. “We compiled a large list of federal databases and tools, and prioritized them based on their relative impact, our confidence that we could archive them, and the relative effort it would take to obtain and archive them.”
And they’re still taking nominations for critical data sets that their volunteer techie brigade should rescue. Here’s a link to their online nomination form.
There are many ways to work together to fight back against the storm front of environmental and climate disaster being pushed by pro-polluter forces at the national and state levels. This is one.
NCLCV is another one, and we can’t do our work without our amazing donors and action takers.
