By Climate Desk
This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In a modern five-story building in the center of Hamburg, Germany, technicians are carefully preparing to install several new server racks—the gray metal casings that hold vital computing hardware—alongside the scores that already line the narrow, dimly lit corridors of the German Climate Computing Center, known as the DKRZ. As one of the world’s premier repositories for climate simulation data, the facility is expanding its infrastructure to meet an unprecedented global challenge. The new equipment will add approximately 5 petabytes of storage capacity to the staggering 254 petabytes of data already archived at the institution. To contextualize the scale, a single petabyte of data requires the storage space equivalent to roughly 200 million high-resolution digital images.
Under normal operating circumstances, the primary mission of the DKRZ is to supply high-performance computing power and secure storage capacity to the broader German climate science community. However, these newly arriving server racks will serve a radically different and highly sensitive purpose. They are being designated to house backup versions of critical climate simulations originating from the other side of the Atlantic. This international preservation operation aims to ensure that essential scientific work performed by United States researchers for the upcoming major United Nations climate assessment, scheduled for 2029, remains secure, transparent, and completely insulated from political interference.
The urgency behind this transatlantic digital rescue mission stems from sweeping policy changes implemented by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Over recent months, the administration has systematically slashed federal funding for climate research, buried scientific reports, removed explicit references to human-caused global warming from dozens of government agency websites, and actively sought to prevent orbiting satellites from collecting essential, long-term environmental data. These actions have severely rattled the international scientific community, prompting proactive countermeasures from European research institutions determined to preserve the historical and contemporary bedrock of global environmental data.
Leaders of prominent German science organizations have publicly cited these unprecedented political actions as their primary motivation for creating these secure foreign backups. Officials at the German Research Foundation, which serves as the country’s main science funding organization, have expressed deep concern that the Trump administration could eventually block European access to vital data and research findings currently stored on servers within the United States. Furthermore, the risk of active data manipulation has emerged as a serious threat to the integrity of global science.
"The deletion of data has also become a possibility," said Kathrin Winkler, a program manager at the German Research Foundation, highlighting the growing anxiety within the scientific sector. "And there is a risk that data could be manipulated to skew findings in a desired direction."
Trust in official U.S. science policy has plummeted to historic lows across Europe, fueling mounting fears that irreplaceable scientific records could vanish. Compounding these concerns, the U.S. government officially withdrew from both the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Although dedicated U.S. researchers continue to contribute vital expertise to global climate science despite these political departures, their institutional backing at home has evaporated. In response to this precarious reality, the German Research Foundation established a specialized funding initiative backed by a $35 million budget designed to provide a secure global haven for permanent copies of endangered U.S. data originating from public and open sources.
The specific DKRZ project dedicated to this safeguarding effort has been named CMIP7-ark, functioning essentially as a technological lifeboat for the U.S. scientific contribution to the seventh assessment report compiled by the IPCC. Alongside this initiative, at least six other dedicated projects aimed at protecting vulnerable U.S. science datasets have received critical funding. These programs operate under descriptive titles such as SHIELD and SEND, which stands for Secure Endangered Earth Data. Christopher Kadow, the head of the data analysis division at the DKRZ, emphasized the moral and professional obligation driving these efforts.
"我们不能仅仅接受重要的贡献可能因为技术或政治原因而丢失," Kadow noted, reflecting a sentiment shared across international laboratories. "We cannot simply accept that important contributions might be lost for technical or political reasons."
Extensive data collections form the fundamental foundation upon which all empirical science is built. Modern climate, environmental, and biodiversity research relies heavily on countless historical and contemporary datasets that span decades or even centuries. Some of these irreplaceable collections—such as the iconic, continuous time series of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai‘i—have been maintained for generations and remain absolutely critical for tracking long-term planetary change. The resilience of these foundational observations was severely tested when the Trump administration attempted to defund and shutter the high-altitude observatory, though those proposed budget cuts were ultimately rejected by the U.S. Congress.
While comprehensive datasets are universally recognized as essential for ongoing research, establishing off-site backups has historically not been standard procedure within the scientific community. Most scientific datasets are physically housed on localized hard drives or magnetic tape libraries located directly at the universities or research institutions where the data is initially generated. One straightforward reason for this decentralized approach is that, until recently, the geopolitical landscape appeared stable enough that researchers saw little need for redundant, off-site safety copies. Another major obstacle is the sheer complexity and cost associated with transferring and storing petabytes of digital information.
Transmitting petabytes of data through standard internet connections can take months, while leasing dedicated, high-speed fiber optic cables involves prohibitive expenses. Consequently, the most economically viable method for moving massive volumes of scientific information remains physically loading the data onto heavy-duty hard drives or inexpensive magnetic tapes. These drives are then transported via what researchers colloquially term the "sneakernet"—physically moving the media by car, commercial aircraft, or container ship to its secure destination.
Despite the expenses and logistical hurdles involved in transporting physical storage media, the traditional model of keeping datasets confined to a single physical location is increasingly viewed as dangerously obsolete in an era defined by rising geopolitical friction, sophisticated cyberattacks, and armed conflicts.
"If data is stored at only one site, there is a much greater risk of loss from events such as extreme weather or infrastructure failure," explained Eleanor O’Rourke, the U.K.-based director of the International Project Office of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, an organization that coordinates global climate models for successive IPCC assessments. Today, climate simulations produced for official IPCC reviews are considered so vital to human society that maintaining overseas backup repositories is widely regarded as a mandatory precaution.
Until recently, the notion that the American scientific community would need foreign allies to track down and rescue lost government datasets would have been considered entirely unthinkable. After all, environmental data generated or funded by U.S. federal agencies is financed by American taxpayers and legally resides in the public domain. Yet these vast digital archives exist in physical forms at specific geographic locations and require dedicated technical experts to maintain their accessibility. This physical reality leaves them inherently vulnerable to human interference, natural disasters, catastrophic technical failures such as electrical short circuits or battery explosions, and administrative neglect.
As data management experts Jennifer Gibson and Kaitlin Thaney recently warned in professional literature, the digital asset management services and preservation systems that ensure research data remains open and accessible are frequently overlooked—right up until the moment they disappear entirely from public view.
A stark illustration of direct political interference materialized with recent threats directed at 300 federally funded datasets meticulously compiled over decades by NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, commonly known as SEDAC. Alex de Sherbinin, the former manager of SEDAC, noted that the center was originally established to serve as an essential bridge between earth science and social science research communities by seamlessly integrating remote sensing satellite observations with granular demographic data regarding human population distribution, regional poverty, and critical infrastructure.
In early April of last year, de Sherbinin was stunned to discover that SEDAC’s extensive datasets had been entirely wiped from active servers following interventions by the administration’s efficiency initiatives. It required an extraordinary, last-minute rescue effort by various independent institutions, which hurriedly scraped datasets directly from active servers while they were still operational to secure the information and transfer it to a new host: the Harvard Dataverse Repository. Prevailing assumptions that U.S. government agencies would inherently preserve scientific data over the long term are proving tenuous at best, de Sherbinin observed, given the pronounced anti-science predisposition driving current federal administration policies.
While numerous parallel projects have emerged to relocate or duplicate endangered datasets within the borders of the United States, America is far from the only nation where digital scientific infrastructure remains vulnerable, and political interference is not the sole risk facing researchers.
Across the globe, prominent research institutions have increasingly become targets of sophisticated cyberattacks. For instance, a multidisciplinary scientific research center in Croatia and an advanced industrial engineering institute in Germany have both fallen victim to elaborate hacking operations in recent years. In these incidents, malicious intruders systematically blocked institutional access to critical research files and demanded substantial financial ransoms to restore system functionality. Victims of such cybercrimes rarely disclose publicly which specific files or datasets were targeted during the breaches, but the vulnerability of sensitive scientific collections to digital extortion is unmistakably rising.
Furthermore, the devastating realities of modern warfare continue to inflict catastrophic damage on global scientific infrastructure. The ongoing military assault launched by Russia against Ukraine has resulted in profound human suffering alongside immense destruction directed at the nation’s academic and scientific institutions.
"Universities and research institutes have been targeted by Russian bombardments, and in some cases they were completely destroyed," said Anastasiia Lutsenko, a Ukrainian researcher currently working at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, whose research focuses on how her home country’s scientific system is adapting to wartime conditions. Russian forces, she noted, are acutely aware of the lasting strategic harm they can inflict by systematically attacking national scientific capacity.
Lutsenko points to the proactive transfer of research data and physical biological samples to secure international locations as a vital survival strategy. Even before the escalation of the full-scale invasion, a collaborative German-Polish-Ukrainian partnership successfully digitized historical records of early meteorological observations conducted between 1808 and 1880 across eight separate Ukrainian weather stations. These digitized records were subsequently transferred to a secure server located at the University of Giessen in Germany, successfully eliminating the risk that centuries of valuable baseline climate data would be destroyed by military conflict. A similar emergency data transfer was successfully executed after missile strikes impacted areas immediately surrounding the servers hosting Ukraine’s official contributions to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility records in Kharkiv shortly after the invasion began.
The imperative need to enhance institutional resilience—defined as the capacity to remain fully functional despite systemic shocks and recover completely from disruptions—served as the primary focus of a major gathering hosted by the American Geophysical Union in Berlin earlier this year. The event brought together nearly 100 leading scientific experts, primarily hailing from the United States and across Europe, to deliberate on coordinated responses to political and environmental threats facing the global research community.
The American Geophysical Union represents more than 60,000 Earth and space scientists worldwide and has increasingly emerged as an international leader in efforts to shield science and scientists from politically motivated attacks. When the U.S. administration declined to dispatch official government experts to IPCC meetings, the organization responded by forming the U.S. Academic Alliance for the IPCC, successfully nominating nearly 300 prominent American scientists to serve as authors for the upcoming global assessment. Building on these efforts, the organization formally launched its global Data Resilience Project, a sweeping international initiative designed to fundamentally rethink how scientific data is organized, protected, and shared.
Ben Zaitchik, president-elect of the American Geophysical Union, addressed the Berlin assembly by emphasizing that the scientific enterprise has arrived at a critical historical inflection point.
"We have engaged in triage efforts to ensure data remains usable and accessible," Zaitchik told attendees. "लेकिन we clearly now have arrived at a moment where we must fundamentally reimagine data organization and maintenance for long-term viability and growth."
During the Berlin meetings, establishing redundant backups of comprehensive datasets and storing them in secure, geographically distant locations was identified as an absolute priority. Delegates also stressed the necessity of coordinating a unified global data community capable of mitigating both current and future systemic risks. An AGU spokesperson noted that safeguarding these repositories is vital not only for academic researchers, but equally for civil engineers, public safety officials, public health experts, policymakers, and a wide array of global industries and local communities that depend daily on reliable scientific data. As a direct result of the discussions in Berlin, a broad coalition of German national research centers was officially established to offer secure, long-term storage for public domain datasets to scientists facing threats in the United States and other regions.
Complementing the large-scale computational efforts underway at the DKRZ, numerous specialized initiatives are taking shape across diverse scientific disciplines. For instance, the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt is actively archiving data captured by wildlife monitoring trail cameras deployed in conflict-affected regions of Ukraine, alongside vulnerable biodiversity datasets originating from war-torn Yemen.
"We want to ensure that biodiversity data remains usable even under crisis conditions," a museum spokesperson stated.
Experts emphasize that for such international data transfers to succeed, it is critical to preserve not only the raw data files themselves, but also the specialized software environments and documentation required to accurately read, process, and analyze the information.
"We’re developing protocols and procedures for exchanging data, distributing multiple copies globally, and ensuring that the data remains analyzable indefinitely," explained Frank Oliver Glöckner, a professor of Earth systems data science at the University of Bremen and head of Pangaea, a long-term data repository operated jointly by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and the university. Both institutions are currently preparing to integrate extensive data streams from a U.S. climate research center slated for closure by federal authorities.
Reflecting on the broader implications of these defensive measures, Glöckner suggested that the political pressures exerted by the Trump administration have paradoxically highlighted systemic vulnerabilities in how science is managed globally. In a sense, he argued, the administration has inadvertently done the scientific community a service by demonstrating the critical danger of hoarding data in isolated locations rather than genuinely sharing it across the global scientific network.
Looking toward the future, researchers hope to build a more interconnected and robust digital architecture.
"It would be ideal if, in the future, all climate data worldwide were connected via digital pipelines," said Kadow of the DKRZ. "That way, in the event of a threat, we could simply flip a switch to secure it elsewhere."
Kadow added that such global solidarity could eventually benefit researchers in nations experiencing their own domestic political shifts. In Germany, for example, the Alternative for Germany party—an extreme far-right political movement that actively denies mainstream climate science—recently secured a state-level election victory for the first time.
"We don’t know what political shifts may occur in Germany," Kadow concluded, noting that European institutions are not entirely insulated from the types of political turbulence and anti-science sentiment currently unfolding in the United States.