“What data gaps and ignorance can we afford as a society?”

Cutbacks, terminations, arrests—in countries around the world, we are currently witnessing a battle against science for ideological reasons that is reminiscent of the darkest times in Europe. The focus is on “wokeness,” “gender,” climate, and health, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion and even science as a whole. 

In the United States of America, of all countries, the government of the world's most powerful scientific nation is at the forefront of this battle. In addition to health research, the geosciences are particularly affected because climate change and environmental protection have been declared “non-topics”, and Earth observation programmes are threatened with cuts or closure. 

This not only puts decades of partnerships at serious risk, but also valuable data sets. The environmental data service of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) alone lists dozens of data sets and products that are to be discontinued. These include data from earthquake catalogues and ocean currents.

This threatens to cause gaps in global measurement networks that are essential for Earth observation and thus for climate models and early warning systems. In addition, we often process scientific data in international networks on a collaborative basis, for example, sensors somewhere on Earth or in space, collect raw data which are processed by partners worldwide to be made available for other scientists. There is a worry that these processing steps may drop out.

In the Helmholtz Research Field Earth and Environment, we discuss jointly organising storage capacities, expertise, and interfaces before important data disappears irretrievably. To do this, we need not only hardware but also personnel as we cannot provide processing and access services in the long term with our existing staff.

We have for now agreed on a set of endangered data sets that we could take over and make available to the scientific community. Existing services such as PANGEA from the AWI or GFZ Data Services can help here. By increasing human resources for a transition period, we can buy time for long-term European solutions. We need redundancy (without unnecessary duplication of data sets) and embedding of new data sets and data streams into European structures. Networks and infrastructures such as ERICs (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) already exist and could be addressed.

As Germany's largest research organization, Helmholtz should be a pioneer in this area and pave the way for a path that we must follow together with other research organizations and European policymakers. To do this, we need to free up resources or raise additional funds.

Massive cuts and closures are often framed by the question of what kind of science we want to afford. In my view, this is fundamentally wrong. Instead, we must ask what data gaps and what ignorance we as a society are willing to accept. And we must point out what the consequences of this ignorance are. As humanity, we are facing a multi-crisis of planetary proportions, alone with biodiversity loss and global warming. We are heading toward hazards that will not disappear if we close our eyes, quite the contrary.

Susanne Buiter