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........

© Macleans