Altering Access: New Report Analyzes Changes to Climate Topics Across Thousands of US Federal Agency Websites

From the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI):

In EDGI’s latest report, “The New Digital Landscape,” we build on our existing research to analyze how the Trump administration has altered access to climate change information on federal environmental websites and the language used to present it. Over the thousands of websites we monitor, we find:

• the use of the terms “climate change,” “clean energy,” and “adaptation” dropped by 26% between 2016 and 2018
• catch-all terms that are employed to undermine clear analysis – such as “energy independence,” “resilience,” and “sustainability” – increased by 26%
• Over half of all pages where “climate change” was completely removed from public access (73 / 136) were U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pages. Such removals are significant given that EPA.gov was the 1,750th most visited website in the U.S. in early 2019, giving it more reach than even WhiteHouse.gov. ¹

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In the report, we classify website changes made by the administration into three types:

• Undermining climate change as a key component of pressing policy challenges – such as when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) removed all references to “climate change” on a page dealing with how workers and employers can manage heat-related health risks on the job.
• Changing descriptions of science and scientists – such as when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recategorized the work of some of its researchers from “Climate Science” to categories like “Ecosystems”.
• Removing access to and descriptions of resources – such as the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Climate Change Clearinghouse, which was removed from climate.dot.gov, later restored elsewhere, and largely removed again.

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We conclude our report with three recommendations to not only mitigate the harm done by the Trump administration, but also to build a more just federal web infrastructure around climate change information:

• Restore – to counter removals of critical information, restore it.
• Revamp – transparently update and maintain pages with the latest science.
• Rethink – pursue environmental data justice. EDJ is about making sure data are accessible to, controlled by, and relevant to communities. ⁴ Several of the removals and page edits we document in the report unduly affect marginalized populations (e.g. workers, the elderly, and Spanish-language speakers). Web resources must be legible and relevant to all.

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