With five weeks until Donald Trump takes office as President of the United States, researchers at the University of Toronto are using the time remaining to preserve environmental information they fear could be lost under his administration.

On Saturday, the university is hosting a “guerilla archiving” event to identify programs and data made publicly accessible by the Environmental Protection Agency for archiving.

“The Trump transition team has been very explicit in its desire to cut particular environmental governance programs and have taken anti-science or non-evidence based approaches to their vision of environmental and climate regulation,” said Michelle Murphy, director of U of T’s Technoscience Research Unit and one of the event’s organizers. “We’re taking seriously those statements.”

Trump, who recently appointed fossil fuel industry ally Scott Pruitt as head of the APA, has called global warming a “hoax” and said during the campaign he’d dismantle the EPA “in almost every form.”

That’s caused concern that crucial scientific and environmental data made publicly available by the U.S. government could disappear, or be made less accessible, during the next four years.

“We know that climate change is one of the things that they have been explicit about but they also are very explicit about wanting to make less regulation. . . for things like fracking, for things like pipelines,” said Murphy. “So we expect that there will be not only moves to collect less data relative to those kinds of projects but also to make it more difficult for communities to access the data that would help them organize around the environmental effects of those kinds of projects.”

The event is the first of a series in North America to support the End of Term 2016 project by the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library which also hosts the popular “Wayback Machine” of old web pages. Since 2008, the Internet Archive has captured and saved U.S. government websites at the end of presidential administrations.

While Trump hasn’t vowed to remove publicly available data, it’s a possibility that scientists feel they need to prepare for.

“Many of the people who have been involved in the transition team or have been appointed to prominent posts in the new administration have either attacked climate scientists or have been hostile to climate scientists,” said Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Many of them have worked for organizations that have wanted to dismantle the federal climate scientific enterprise for quite a long time and now that they’re inside the walls of the castle, there’s a lot of concern that they will do deep damage,” said Halpern. “Scientists and local officials and all kind of decision makers rely heavily on data that’s provided by the U.S. government on all kinds of environmental and public health issues.”

Halpern said he hopes these efforts will put pressure on the incoming administration not to pull vital information.

“We’re well aware of what happened under Stephen Harper in Canada with regard to the disappearance of information and the shutdown of various libraries,” he said. “We saw libraries go offline and have their contents thrown in dumpsters in the U.S. as well during the Bush administration.”

In 2013, the Canadian government under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced plans to consolidate 1,500 government websites into one, a process that U of T librarian Sam-chin Li said would eliminate 60 per cent of online content.

She and other academic librarians crowdsourced important web pages to be preserved online through the Internet Archive.

“Websites can be erased overnight for a variety of reasons like the change of the leadership,” said Li.

Political motivations could also be a factor, she said. For instance, the word “environment” disappeared in 2012 from a section of Transport Canada’s website which detailed the Navigable Waters Protection Act.

“Removing the word ‘environment’ really changed the public’s perception of the act from one that protects the environment to protection of navigation,” said Li. “This is the kind of slightly different word. . . that will be giving misinterpretation of this particular act.”

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The U of T event runs 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, and Murphy said she hopes people with a variety of skills in organization, research and technology come out.

“In addition to caring about data, ultimately what we’re hoping is that all this concern about preserving data will translate into a concern for evidence-based environmental governance,” she said.

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