Countries in Europe are moving to reduce their reliance on critical scientific data long provided freely by the United States, instead accelerating the development of their own climate and weather monitoring systems, according to Reuters interviews.
The effort – which has not been previously reported – marks the most concrete response from the European Union and other European governments so far to the U.S. government’s retreat from scientific research under President Donald Trump’s administration.
Since his return to the White House, Trump has initiated sweeping budget cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centres for Disease Control and other agencies, dismantling programs conducting climate, weather, geospatial and health research, and taking some public databases offline.
As those cuts take effect, European officials have expressed increasing alarm that – without continued access to U.S.-supported weather and climate data – governments and businesses will face challenges in planning for extreme weather events and long-term infrastructure investment, according to Reuters interviews. In March, more than a dozen European countries urged the EU Commission to move fast to recruit American scientists who lost their jobs to those cuts.
Asked for comment on NOAA cuts and the EU’s moves to expand its own collection of scientific data, the White House Office of Management and Budget said Trump’s proposed cuts to the agency’s 2026 budget were aimed at programs that spread “fake Green New Scam ‘science,'” a reference to climate change research and policy.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. is funding real science again,” Rachel Cauley, an OMB spokesperson, said via email.
European officials told Reuters that – beyond the risk of losing access to data that is bedrock to the world’s understanding of climate change and marine systems – they were concerned by the general U.S. pullback from research.
“The current situation is much worse than we could have expected,” Sweden’s State Secretary for Education and Research, Maria Nilsson, told Reuters. “My reaction is, quite frankly, shock.”
The Danish Meteorological Institute described the U.S. government data as “absolutely vital” – and said it relied on several data sets to measure, including sea ice in the Arctic and sea surface temperatures.
“This isn’t just a technical issue; reliable data underpins extreme weather warnings, climate projections, protecting communities and ultimately saves lives,” said Adrian Lema, director of the DMI’s National Centre for Climate Research.
Reuters interviewed officials from eight European countries who said their governments were undertaking reviews of their reliance on U.S. marine, climate and weather data. Officials from seven countries – Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden – described joint efforts now in the early stages to safeguard key health and climate data and research programs.
Leaning On The US
As a priority, the EU is expanding its access to ocean observation data, a senior European Commission official told Reuters. Those data sets are seen as critical to the shipping and energy industries as well as early storm warning systems.
Over the next two years, the senior official said, the EU plans to expand its own European Marine Observation and Data Network, which collects and hosts data on shipping routes, seabed habitats, marine litter and other concerns.
The initiative was aimed at “mirroring and possibly replacing US-based services,” the senior European Commission official told Reuters.
Europe is particularly concerned about its vulnerability to U.S. funding cuts to NOAA’s research arm that would affect the Global Ocean Observing System, a network of ocean observation programs that support navigation services, shipping routes and storm forecasting, a second EU official told Reuters.
The insurance industry relies on the Global Ocean Observing System’s disaster records for risk modelling. Coastal planners use shoreline, sea-level, and hazard data to guide infrastructure investments. The energy industry uses oceanic and seismic datasets to assess offshore drilling or wind farm viability.
In addition, the senior EU Commission official said, the EU is considering increasing its funding of the Argo program, a part of the Global Ocean Observing System which operates a global system of floats to monitor the world’s oceans and track global warming, extreme weather events and sea-level rise.
NOAA last year described the program, in operation for over 25 years, as the “crown jewel” of ocean science. It makes its data freely available to the oil and gas industry, marine tourism and other industries.
The United States funds 57% of Argo’s $40 million annual operating expenses, while the EU funds 23%. The White House and NOAA did not respond to questions about future support for that program.
The European moves to establish independent data collection and play a bigger role in Argo represent a historic break with decades of U.S. leadership in ocean science, said Craig McLean, who retired in 2022 after four decades at the agency. He said U.S. leadership of weather, climate and marine data collection was unmatched, and that through NOAA, the U.S. has paid for more than half of the world’s ocean measurements.
European scientists acknowledge the outsized role the U.S. government has played in global scientific research and data collection – and that European countries have grown overly dependent on that work.
“It’s a bit like defence: we rely heavily on the U.S. in that area, too. They’re trailblazers and role models—but that also makes us dependent on them,” Katrin Boehning-Gaese, scientific director of Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, told Reuters.
(With inputs from Reuters)
