Committee on the Environment

Safeguarding tools & data: a running list of sources

By Kira Gould

Amid shifts at the Federal level, a number of groups are securing databases and tools that many of the built environment community depend on. Many people are worried about losing access to US Federal data that may go offline or already has. Among the data that many in our community are concerned may be at risk of becoming unavailable is US Energy Information Administration (EIA) data, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) C-MORE program, and the Open Energy Data Initiative (OEDI) data from the Department of Energy. 

In fact, this topic has become a massive time-sink for many scientists and others who are scrambling to preserve data sources of all types: health, weather, population, and more. Losing access to these tools hampers our community’s ability to make informed decisions about health and environmental issues and design facilities that respond to these factors and others. 

There are a number of efforts (some started in November) that have sought to archive datasets and tools. COTE is gathering this information as we see if released and will build on this list as needed. We are editing this list to prioritize sources that are the most critical to built environment functions. (At present, we’re including some more general sources.) 

If you have any sources to share, please feel free to send those to me at kiragould@kiragould.com.

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Archive of Data.gov: ​​https://source.coop/repositories/harvard-lil/gov-data/description

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Repository of missing federal data compiled by Boston University: https://findlostdata.org

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Repository of US Census: https://census.icpsr.umich.edu/census/

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US GOV FTP and HTTP file servers: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/uc8wdVNVwz 

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All public datasets from data.cdc.gov on 28 Jan 2025 ( before datasets were removed ): https://archive.org/details/20250128-cdc-datasets 

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End of Term Web Archive: https://eotarchive.org/ 

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Restored CDC: https://restoredcdc.org/www.cdc.gov/ 

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The preserved FEMA Future Risk Index: This tool shows how much climate change will cost American communities. Click a county to see its risk rating and projected losses under different emissions scenarios.This tools shows the near-term economic stakes of climate change. (Props to Jeremy Herzog and Rajan Desai at Fulton Ring for rebuilding it.) https://fulton-ring.github.io/nri-future-risk/ 

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The administration took down the EPA’s EJScreen in early February. Public Environmental Data Partners preserved a copy:  https://screening-tools.com/epa-ejscreen (and here: https://pedp-ejscreen.azurewebsites.net/). 

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PEDP is offering access to the EJScreen and other datasets and screening tools here. (The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, part of PEDP, has been working for months to archive critical federal environmental data. More at their website. And if you are interested in volunteering or know someone who is, here’s a form to get involved: https://envirodatagov.org/volunteer/.)

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In the months and weeks leading up to the 2025 Inauguration, Atlas Public Policy began an archiving effort to preserve agency data and resources. Learn more at the Climate Program Portal’s Federal Archive site. 

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The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) offers an array of open data and resources related to sustainability, and their team has been working to get a number of government datasets (such as those from NASA and NOAA) secured here. The mission: “ASDI democratizes access to data with the goal of accelerating sustainability research, innovation, and collaboration by helping to minimize the cost and time required to acquire and analyze high-value datasets.”

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There is a Harvard effort focused on climate and health data. 

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There is a larger Harvard effort with 16TB of every dataset on data.gov, which is here. 

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Stanford is also running a federal data collection program and accepting submissions here.  

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There is a long list of efforts collated by Syracuse University's library.

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Perhaps less useful or as a last resort are such sources as the End of Term Archive and also the Internet Archive (aka Wayback Machine). 

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If you have any sources or information to share, please feel free to send those to me at kiragould@kiragould.com, and I’ll see that they are added to the list.

Kira Gould, Hon. AIA, LEED AP, is a writer, strategist, and convener focused on advancing design leadership and climate action. Kira is the co-host of the Design the Future podcast with Lindsay Baker. Through Kira Gould CONNECT, she consults on strategy and communications to organizations working toward a regenerative future. She is a Senior Fellow with Architecture 2030 and is a volunteer with AIA Committee on the Environment. She co-authored Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design (Ecotone, 2007) with the late architect and author Lance Hosey. She worked on staff at Metropolis magazine and in-house at Multistudio (when it was Gould Evans) and William McDonough + Partners before starting her consultancy. She lives in the Kansas City area. She is not an architect.