NASA won’t publish key climate change report online, citing ‘no legal obligation’ to do so

A major climate report, the U.S. government’s primary, peer-reviewed climate assessment that is completed every four to five years, will not be published on NASA’s website, reversing course after the White House indicated the space agency would make the document publicly available online.

The decision complicates public access to the National Climate Assessment (NCA), which contains key scientific findings used to track risks and impacts of climate change across the United States. NASA says it will not post the climate report to its website, citing lack of legal obligation. The move contradicts a July 3 statement from the White House naming NASA as the new host for the documents after their original site, globalchange.gov, was shut down, according to an Associated Press report.

“NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov’s data,” NASA’s press secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email to Space.com. She added that the USGCRP — the U.S. Global Change Research Program, responsible for overseeing the study and previously published the findings on its own website — “met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress,” Stevens said.

The NCA is a legally-mandated report that is issued about twice a decade, and provides peer-reviewed analysis of climate change impacts across the U.S. It outlines localized risks climate change pose to public health, agriculture, infrastructure and more, and is used to guide municipalities’ mitigatory steps in the face of natural disasters like floods, heatwaves, storms and droughts on an ever-warming Earth.

While past reports can still be accessed in some form in the online annals of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the official USGCRP website remains down. As of yet, no other agency has been publicly assigned to host the reports.

The breakdown in public access has drawn concerns about government transparency and long-term support for climate research. The White House’s FY2026 budget proposal for NASA already suggests stripping the agency of 47% of its science funding, though that may now be getting some pushback from lawmakers in Congress.

The next NCA is scheduled to be published in 2028, but its future is uncertain. According to the New York Times, hundreds of scientists already working on the upcoming report were dismissed by the Trump Administration in April.

Josh Dinner is the Staff Writer for Spaceflight at Space.com. He is a writer and photographer with a passion for science and space exploration, and has been working the space beat since 2016. Josh has covered the evolution of NASA’s commercial spaceflight partnerships and crewed missions from the Space Coast, as well as NASA science missions and more. He also enjoys building 1:144-scale model rockets and human-flown spacecraft. Find some of Josh’s launch photography on Instagram and his website, and follow him on X, where he mostly posts in haiku.