The Trump administration has ended federal support for the Arctic Report Card, a 20-year-old annual study documenting environmental changes in the Arctic region. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has facilitated the report for two decades, confirmed on Monday that it will no longer coordinate the 2026 edition.
The Arctic Report Card is a peer-reviewed technical document published every December that summarizes data on sea ice, regional flora and fauna, and the conditions affecting residents of the Arctic. While NOAA facilitated the report in 2025, the agency did not issue a news release for that year's findings, leaving communication to outside institutions.
NOAA spokesperson Kim Doster stated that while the agency will not facilitate the 2026 report, data historically contributed by NOAA will continue to be collected and remain publicly available. Sources familiar with the matter said the agency provided no specific reason for the immediate suspension of support. The decision follows other recent changes at NOAA, including the cessation of the annual billion-dollar disasters report and the dismissal of authors for the National Climate Assessment.
The scale of the impact involves a region warming at approximately three times the global rate, with the report historically serving as a central data source for educational settings and national security planning. One source noted that the document has previously been cited by NATO, indicating that its findings are used by international defense and policy organizations to monitor Arctic environmental shifts. The lack of a centralized federal platform may change how this data is disseminated to the public and policymakers who rely on it for long-term planning.
The concrete change for researchers and the public will be the absence of a coordinated federal release in December 2026. While raw data from NOAA will remain public, the synthesized analysis and peer-reviewed chapters will no longer be unified under the agency's banner. This follows a broader trend at NOAA, which has also halted updates to climate.gov. Lead authors are currently attempting to determine how to continue the report independently, but no final plan or new publication date has been established since the Monday notification.