During Barack Obama’s final year in office, his Administration launched an ambitious, twenty-five-million-dollar partnership with a little-known research organization in Belize called the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre. The goal of the program was to study climate change in the Caribbean and develop strategies to minimize its impact. Scientists consider the region one of the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change; rising sea levels, coral-reef bleaching, and drought threaten the infrastructure and economic health of the Caribbean’s forty-four million people, many of whom depend on tourism and agriculture for their well-being. “Our area is one of the most exposed to risks,” Zadie Neufville, a spokesperson for the Centre, told me, in an interview in her office, in Belmopan. “In order to live here comfortably and host tourists, we have to mitigate, build resilience, and adapt.”

As part of the partnership, the United States Agency for International Development, U.S.A.I.D., provided funding for aerial laser-mapping devices, to survey topography and underwater landscapes, and high-tech buoys that monitor the health of coral reefs and the surrounding sea. The initiative, formally known as the Climate Change Adaptation Program, was designed to bolster the region’s ability to monitor, withstand, and predict extreme weather fluctuations. “Data, as it relates to some of these parameters, has been one of our major challenges,” Ulric Trotz, a scientist who is the deputy executive director of the Centre, told me. “We are data starved.”

After the 2016 Presidential election, the Trump Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress reduced U.S. support for climate-change-related research, causing the Centre’s program and similar initiatives around the world to scramble for funding. A U.S.A.I.D. official told me that American funding for the Centre’s project will end in 2019, instead of in 2020, because of a change in “the Administration’s foreign-policy and national-security priorities.”

Under Obama, the United States was the world’s largest donor to the Green Climate Fund—a global reserve fund created to, among other things, help developing countries invest in renewable and low-emission technologies. Obama pledged three billion dollars, a third of which was contributed before he left office. Trump, who has dismissed climate change as a hoax spread by China, has pledged no money to the fund. Earlier this week, the fund’s director resigned, and some began to question its viability after no new projects were approved at its most recent board meeting.

In its 2019 budget plan, the Trump White House cut U.S.A.I.D. spending on initiatives related to the environment to roughly two hundred million dollars, a reduction of about seventy per cent from typical Obama-era spending. Last year, Congress rejected some of the climate-change-related cuts in the Trump Administration’s 2018 budget. Environmental groups hope that will occur again this year, but, over all, funding is expected to continue to decrease under Trump.

In Africa, the Trump Administration has moved to eliminate all funding for climate-related or environmental projects across the continent, including in Senegal, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. Indonesia is one of the largest carbon emitters in the world, and, in 2017, U.S.A.I.D. planned to spend $23.3 million on environmental projects there, including a reforestation project designed to control carbon emissions. Only seven million dollars has been allotted to the country in Trump’s 2019 budget proposal. “Across the board, there has been a rollback on federal climate-change investments as a result of executive direction,” Kit Batten, a former U.S.A.I.D. climate-change coördinator, told me.

Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, accused the Trump Administration of making the cuts as a way to boost the profits of the fossil-fuel industry. “Powerful coal, oil, and gas interests wield enormous influence in Washington, especially with Republicans in the White House and Congress,” Leahy said in an e-mail. “If the United States, a major contributor to global warming, does not lead by example, we will have failed what is perhaps the most important test of our generation regarding the Earth’s future habitability.”

The poorest countries in the world, including those in the Caribbean, emit about one-fifth of global carbon emissions, yet they are the most susceptible to the effects of climate change. As a result, leaders from many of these nations who previously looked to Washington for support and guidance are now searching for new sources of funding. “Most of these institutions were either created by the United States, or the U.S. had a big role in shaping them,” David Victor, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. “When the American domestic politics turned south on multilateralism, there is this larger kind of stasis-inducing effect on the rest of the international system.”

Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord has also fuelled uncertainty in developed countries that export fossil fuels regarding how much to invest in renewable energy. “The Republicans seem to have an antipathy towards anything that seems it would challenge the ability of the U.S. and other countries to export fossil fuels,” an official familiar with the conversations told me.

During the Obama Administration, U.S.A.I.D. provided ten million dollars in funding to the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre’s program. During my visit to the Centre last month, Trotz and other scientists told me that they had frozen plans to conduct fifteen pilot studies on ten islands until they can find funding to make up for the Trump cuts. The Centre has also reduced training sessions on how to use CARIWIG, a database that allows researchers and policy makers to simulate the impacts of hurricanes, storm surges, and other weather events. Two-week tutorials have been carried out in St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Guyana, and Barbados, but sessions in other countries in the region have been delayed. Researchers at the Centre hope that pledged funding from Italy, Australia, and other countries will save the project.

“We are already severely strained financially in our governments, so, once we lose funding and support, it makes it difficult for us to move forward,” Diana Ruiz, who runs trainings for the Centre, told me. “All of our assets, our livelihoods, and everything, is at risk, so it puts us at a disadvantage.”

Atlantic hurricane season began on June 1st, and researchers fear a repeat of last summer: extreme storms with little planning on how to mitigate their impact. “It’s a source of frustration for a lot of people,” a former U.S.A.I.D. adviser told me. “The money flows into the countries for a disaster, and, as soon as the disaster’s over, it will completely disappear with no prep work for the next one.” Climate change in the Caribbean will eventually have a direct impact on the United States, he argued. When large hurricanes occur, many victims in the West Indies flee to the nearest country with the most stable conditions, which is often the United States. “This is a problem for the U.S.—migration,” Trotz told me. “The issue, basically, is a hemispheric problem that we have to be careful about.”