Last year was a deeply challenging period for anyone who studies climate change for a living, marking a dramatic and unsettling pivot in the American scientific landscape. The United States, historically respected around the world for its sprawling investments in research, innovation, and institutional science, suddenly reversed course. Shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term in office, his administration set to work slashing funds for America’s scientific institutions, scrapping billions of dollars in vital research grants, and firing thousands of federal employees at agencies ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
People were simply "in shock," said Aparna Shrivastava, who served as a senior climate official in the Biden administration. In private group chats and encrypted messaging threads, she suddenly found herself in daily conversation with dozens of world-class experts who had abruptly lost their livelihoods or institutional funding overnight. Despite facing sudden unemployment, these researchers shared a fierce, unified desire to continue studying the rapidly warming planet or trying to prevent its worst environmental and societal effects. Yet, the sheer suddenness and scale of the government cuts left many with vanishingly few options.
All of them were trying to figure out what they could possibly do to address this unprecedented crisis, Shrivastava recalled. Eventually, those urgent digital conversations started happening in-person, bridging the gap between isolated researchers and collaborative problem-solvers. At a workshop convened by the Aspen Global Change Institute in Colorado last July, a group of more than 30 climate experts landed on a potential solution—one that would help fund new jobs for laid-off colleagues scattered across the country. Today, that grassroots idea has blossomed into a full-fledged initiative, backed by tens of millions of dollars, with Shrivastava at the helm. They call themselves the Climate Reserve, and they are now taking their operation public.
A New Safety Net for Displaced Scientists
The Climate Reserve functions through an agile network of experts united by a singular mission: to identify the most critical climate work left in limbo by federal cuts and find a secure place where it can continue, even without government support. Sometimes that means placing a displaced climate researcher with an established environmental organization or climate nonprofit; other times, that means finding a brand-new home for crucial projects that the federal government ruthlessly pruned from its budget, Shrivastava explained.
So far, the Climate Reserve has funded more than two dozen new positions for displaced climate experts. These individuals, known internally as fellows, are now working across the United States at prominent nonprofits such as the Environmental Protection Network and academic institutions like the University of Minnesota. The group has also successfully resuscitated a number of high-profile federal projects that had been mothballed or defunded. Among them is EJScreen, an essential online mapping tool that highlights which American communities experience the heaviest burdens of pollution. Beyond domestic borders, there is vital international work happening as well, such as a project mapping accelerating sea level rise on vulnerable islands in Panama, and another measuring complex greenhouse gas emissions across five distinct African countries.
Yet, there is even more work happening behind the scenes that the group is currently unwilling to share publicly. Organizers hope that a careful measure of secrecy will keep some of its fellows and sensitive projects safely out of the crosshairs of the Trump administration, which has been notably punitive with some of its federal funding cuts. After all, many of the institutions and individuals working within the broader network still rely on federal funding in some capacity or plan to apply for federal grants in the future, making discretion an important strategy for survival.
Now that the Climate Reserve is making tangible progress and demonstrating its viability, its leaders are willing to take calculated risks to be more open about their efforts, largely to attract more philanthropic funding and support for a growing pool of unemployed researchers. So many qualified professionals are still desperately out of work, Shrivastava noted. In a testament to the scale of the displacement, even the Lyft driver in Washington, D.C., who drove her to the airport to meet potential funders this spring happened to be a recently laid-off climate and energy expert.
Movement Generosity and the "Unsexy" Data
The name "Climate Reserve" was deliberately chosen to evoke both a nature reserve and the Army Reserve—envisioned as an emergency group that you can call upon to bring people together in a crisis, said Brittany Janis, executive director at the nonprofit Open Environmental Data Project, who was involved in the group’s discussions from the very beginning. Her organization recently partnered with the Climate Reserve to hire a former senior advisor for environmental justice programs in the Biden administration to keep the now-independent EJScreen tool updated and running smoothly for the public.
Funding these positions is meant to provide a kind of structural "parachute" that can help former federal workers, along with all their specialized knowledge and the professional relationships they have painstakingly built over decades, land in a safe and productive place, Janis said. How can the scientific community be truly thoughtful about parachuting people to the right places so society does not lose all that irreplaceable institutional knowledge and the critical baseline for climate action in the United States?
Unlike a traditional corporate hiring process or a competitive grant-funding system, the group deliberately wants to emphasize collaboration rather than competition, according to Ben Poulter, who leads an emissions-monitoring program at Spark, a climate solutions nonprofit that is in the process of hiring two Climate Reserve fellows. Early on, organizers realized that the sweeping changes happening across the country could fragment the scientific community even further as financial resources grew scarcer. The whole point of the Climate Reserve is that everyone is in the same boat and must work together to stay afloat.
This philosophy—dubbed "movement generosity" by several of the group’s founders—means focusing firmly on the broader, long-term goals of the climate movement and trying to share resources, data, and expertise across disparate organizations to achieve them. For instance, a single expert funded by the Climate Reserve could conceivably split their time between two different organizations, allowing them to closely coordinate on similar projects and significantly reduce redundant labor.
Poulter, who previously coordinated complex greenhouse gas monitoring efforts between federal agencies, now leads a program tracking how ecosystems that are especially sensitive to warming—such as wetlands—will release massive amounts of planet-warming emissions as global temperatures rise. This dangerous ecological feedback loop is frequently overlooked by standard climate models. One of the fellows working at Spark will coordinate these critical measurements across five African countries, while another will translate that complex science into actionable policy recommendations for those nations, Poulter said.
Beyond field measurements, there is also a tremendous amount of vitally important but "unsexy" data-crunching work being saved by the Climate Reserve, said Sonia Wang, who leads the Center for Climate and Environmental Data at the Data Foundation, a nonprofit think tank. This meticulous data harmonization is an essential, though often invisible, part of understanding the hard realities of climate change. For example, two different research groups using satellites to detect methane emissions might end up with wildly different estimates if they are not utilizing identical wind speed models and calibration standards.
Sorting out those complex discrepancies is not the flashiest thing in the world, but when you look under the hood, this is precisely what is necessary for credible science, Wang said. Her organization has taken on four Climate Reserve-funded experts to help with these exact kinds of behind-the-scenes projects that make it far easier for decision-makers, researchers, and the public to trust climate data.
Looking Ahead
By the end of this month, the Climate Reserve will have placed 50 climate experts into vital new roles, and the initiative plans to triple its overall funding by the end of next year, according to Shrivastava. And if federal support for climate research eventually returns in a different political climate, its organizers fervently hope that the resilient network they are building today will make the entire field more collaborative and robust against future political shifts. They are not looking to replace the government; rather, they are simply stepping up to meet an immediate, overwhelming need.
Climate change may be heavily politicized in the United States, but its physical impacts affect everyone, noted John Balbus, a Climate Reserve fellow who spent 15 years working within the federal government. Most recently, Balbus served as a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services, coordinating projects to address the compounding health effects of climate change, such as seasonal forecasts for extreme heat waves and the escalating crisis of wildfire smoke. He is now continuing that essential public health work at the Federation of American Scientists and as an independent consultant.
The climate and health experts that Balbus once worked alongside would do anything in their human power to continue living a life of dedicated public service, even without the backing of a government job, he said. And the societal need for this critical work is not going away anytime soon. If anything, the need is only going to get stronger and more urgent with every passing year.