“Stunningly short-sighted” NOAA grant cuts threaten US climate resilience

After Donald Trump began his second term as president of the U.S. in 2025, his administration moved to dramatically cut federal funding for agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which administers grants for community-based projects that often focus on climate resilience. The nonprofit Grant Witness has created a database of those awards and found that as of Sept. 2, NOAA awarded just 229 grants this year, a 74% drop compared to an average of 891 by that date in an average year. NOAA also terminated at least 26 existing grants including $1.2 million for the nonprofit New Orleans Community Support Foundation. The grant was intended to support climate-resilient water management, particularly for Black and Indigenous communities in New Orleans, a flood-prone city chronically facing extreme weather events and sea level rise. The grant would have supported “planning around infrastructure to prevent flooding and other types of challenges associated with living on the coast,” Scott Delaney, a co-founder of Grant Witness, told Mongabay in a video call. NOAA also terminated more than $2.5 million in funding for the University of Washington’s Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative. In a statement, organizers said the termination was “a major blow to climate adaptation and community-based resilience in the Northwest.” The grant supported ongoing projects with rural and tribal communities in the region to build resilience to extreme heat, drought and sea level rise associated with climate change. “I believe that inclusion of terms like ‘indigenous,’ ‘resilience,’ and ‘climate change’ in the grant…This article was originally published on Mongabay