American Climate Scientists Have a New Canadian Hero

Juan Serpa is no stranger to the altruistic power of data aggregation. One of his earliest online projects, Mono-SOS, used analytics to help outreach workers in Costa Rica rescue injured wildlife. More recently, in his role as a professor with McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management, he created the Sustainability Academic Network, or SUSAN, a pseudo–social network where sustainability-focused academics and researchers in areas as varied as solar energy and circular economics can post jobs and events and connect outside of their subject silos. Now, just six months after it came online, SUSAN has turned into another of Serpa’s digital hubs for endangered species—this time, American climate scientists.

With the Trump government taking a big orange machete to their jobs, funding and even vocabulary, U.S.-based researchers have started storing their environment-focused datasets (on forest fires, plastic pollution and the like) on private servers, then linking out to them via SUSAN. And while Serpa never intended the site to be a refuge for America’s scientific community, they now account for almost 70 per cent of its users. He spoke to Maclean’s about how SUSAN’s standing up to Donald and how Canadian academia could shift as a result.

SUSAN is now being used for all kinds of things, but what was the platform designed to do in the first place?

At McGill, I help NGOs use AI to make their biodiversity projects more efficient. Along with AI, sustainability—whether economic, social or environmental—is one of the fastest-growing areas in research. But in academia, we’re siloed by fields. Engineering, business and medical researchers—they all hang out in their own buildings. Sustainability encompasses all of those fields, so I wanted to create a one-stop virtual shop with profiles where we could all interact. That’s SUSAN.

Sounds like LinkedIn for climate-focused folks.

You know how Truth Social is like Twitter for the right wing? Or JSwipe is a dating app for Jewish people? This is a professional space for environmentalists.

Since Trump’s inauguration, hundreds of U.S. climate researchers have been unceremoniously canned, and phrases like “global warming,” “clean water” and “microplastics” are being widely censored from government reports—science as we know it is being slashed and burned down there. How have Americans been using SUSAN to fight back?

Over the last few months, researchers noticed that information was being erased from U.S. government websites, especially datasets around DEI and climate change—for example, the ones held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which focuses on water and weather. Information on environmental disasters and forest fires was also disappearing. Some of that had to do with departments no longer having the funding to host it, and some of it had to do with the change of administration. You’d wake up one day and the data just… wasn’t there. A lot of gossip started among researchers in different departments who were spreading the word, like, “This is going to disappear in a couple of weeks.”

Individual scientists and organizations like the Data Rescue Project started downloading that public data onto their own servers. The problem is that those people and projects are scattered, and while researchers are good at understanding data, they’re not good at designing a nice website for it. SUSAN has basically become a Yellow Pages for it all—a big centralized directory where they can link out to the data they’ve saved.

Do Americans represent the majority of SUSAN’s users now?
They make up about 60 to 70 per cent of them. It’s a global platform, so that’s a lot. There’s been a big surge of them lately, but the platform’s also only four months old—as long as Donald Trump’s been in office. It was either a great or terrible time for SUSAN to come out. I can’t decide which.  

Pretty great, I think. Have your U.S. users relayed any especially scary tales of what it’s like to be in their line of work right now—either to you directly or via SUSAN? 

They’re saying, “I don’t want to be here” and, “It’s like living in 1984.” Some of them, a day after making their SUSAN profile, have said, “Erase all my data” and “I don’t want to be on here because Elon Musk and those guys are going to target me if I am.” Last year, I applied for a large private grant in the States that was later cut. I lost a month’s worth of work involving a number of researchers. Now that grant doesn’t even exist, because the organization was afraid of appearing too sympathetic to climate change. 

But for every reaction, there’s a counter-reaction. I’m now talking to the National Sustainability Society, which wants to create online communities like SUSAN for its researchers, so they can have conversations and share data privately among each other. I’m also talking with the Climate School at Columbia University. A while back, the university lost $400 million in grant funding because of Donald Trump, who reinstated it after the university later yielded to federal guidelines. The school is very supportive of SUSAN. 

Yeah, well, don’t go after a university’s money!

A lot of people have lost funding, yes, but I also know a lot of researchers from outside the U.S. are afraid of going there because, if they try to apply for a grant, they’re going to be flagged as someone who does climate research. Some of them are actually rebranding themselves as “resilience” researchers instead. It’s hard for a government to ban people who are working to make cities more resilient to disasters, like forest fires and tornados. Climate change obviously plays a role in these disasters, but academics are taking that word out of it. That’s one way they cater to the right wing.

Absurd. Are you more protective of certain climate-related datasets than others? Are there any that would cause more devastation if they were wiped?

The thing about climate change is that it’s not one phenomenon, it’s thousands. Think about the pine beetle, for example. Climate change leads to warmer temperatures, which help pine beetles thrive. The beetles kill trees, which then dry out and catch easier when forest fires happen. The forest fires cause pollution, which causes human health to suffer. Climate researchers are trying to understand the domino effect of it all—and with AI, we can understand those correlations more effectively—but we need data to do that. So there’s no one piece that is more valuable than another. If you remove one, you cannot understand how all the pieces fall down. And, remember: the researchers don’t upload the datasets to our site. SUSAN just redirects people to them. That way, our website doesn’t get attacked or taken down.

Have you received any legal threats from the U.S. government yet?

No. We make sure the liability lies with the people who are uploading the data. It’s also all public, disaggregated data that U.S. citizens are allowed to have. They don’t have information on American government employees or anything. What SUSAN’s doing isn’t anything that anyone would qualify as threatening to anyone. We’re not WikiLeaks. This is just data about glaciers. 

Still, have you thought about how your work with SUSAN could compromise your own ability to travel to the States going forward?

As a responsible Canadian citizen, I won’t be going there for the next four years. I told my wife: “There are 194 other countries we can go to.” We’re just going to have to live with the consequences. All the boycotts of the U.S. government have made us realize how dependent we are on the U.S, and not just economically. We need to generate more research networks that aren’t reliant on them. It feels really weird, though. Most of my connections are with Americans and now I’m looking to European researchers. Luckily, with SUSAN, we’ve been able to create a community of them.  

In April, a French politician introduced a bill to create a “scientific refugee” status, a new immigration pathway for researchers whose work is threatened by the actions of the American government. Could you see something like that working in Canada? 

I think our government will take action very soon, but something like that is already happening at the university level. Many Canadian schools have already had a gigantic surge in applications relative to other years. Some prominent Yale researchers have moved to U of T. I’m the chair of my department at McGill, and I’ve started to see researchers knocking on my door (via email). I know one who’s an outspoken member of the LGBTQ community and lives in a southern state. He’s had to restructure his research—and even take his pronouns out of his email signature. He’s said, “Can I please move there?” When researchers move schools, it usually takes a year, so it’s too early to see how this will all evolve. October and November are big hiring times for lots of universities, so we’ll probably see a big influx of them then.

How will the world feel the ripple effects of America’s science-censorship movement, do you think?

That’s the same as asking what would be lost in the space race if NASA dropped out. The U.S. is the mecca of academia, so the entire world of research has been threatened. Everything used to revolve around the Ivy League. The States also has the industry—Google, Microsoft. And the amount of endowment and IP they’ve accumulated? It’s all just very sad. I worked at Indiana University before I came to Canada in 2015, so I can say the resources they have are vast. 

From what I’ve seen, European scientists are sympathetic to U.S. researchers, but they’re prepared to lead the climate change agenda going forward. In many ways, Europeans are already leaders in areas like animal rights and sustainable agricultural practices, but in terms of funding, all roads led to the U.S. Now, the research supply chain is rerouting toward them.

Now that it’s become so much more than a social network, how do you plan to expand SUSAN in the post-America climate-research era—if I can call it that?

Well, SUSAN’s going to have to become a not-for-profit organization to make sure the platform is financially viable. And next week, in the vein of other social networks, we’re releasing new features, like a home feed and messaging functions. Another future function of SUSAN’s will be project matching, which will allow industry professionals—for example, someone who works at an energy innovation company—to identify researchers who can actually run their initiatives. (Like Tinder for environmental projects.) For now, though, one of our biggest efforts is to bring the entire world of sustainability on board. We’re sending emails to one million researchers from 60,000 universities around the world. It’s a huge endeavour.

Saving the world usually is.

I wouldn’t call SUSAN a “refuge” for researchers. This project was never meant to be antagonistic, as some in the media have cast it. It wasn’t against anybody. It was more like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great to have one place where we could talk with all the wind energy people?” But then, some Americans have said, “This is the best time to have this. We need to unite and react to these threats.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.