President Donald Trump listens as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, June 1, 2017, following Trump's announcement that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate change accord.

(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

At a Glance

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative monitors thousands of government web pages.The watchdog group has found a systematic removal of the words “climate change” from government websites.

The Trump Administration has significantly removed the mention of "climate change" across all government websites, a new report says.

According to the report released Wednesday by theEnvironmental Data and Governance Initiative, the from government websites, along with the administration's continued efforts to delete or bury information on the topic, could have serious implications.

"The Trump administration has overhauled important environmental web pages, removed documents related to climate change, and altered the waysenvironmental webpages refer to climate change in a way that obscures or at least significantly downplays the issue," Lindsey Dillon, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz and thechair of EDGI's steering committee, . "We're seeing reduced access to climate change information, especially at the Environmental Protection Agency."

EDGI is an internationalwatchdog group comprised of academics, lawyers, archivistsand others who promote open and accessible government data. The group monitorstens of thousands of federal environmental websites for changes in how public information is disseminated. This is their third report.

Among this report's key findings are the removal and ongoing overhaul of the EPA's climate change website. The authorsnote that this decision "raises strong concerns about loss of access to valuable information for state, local, and tribal governments, and for educators, policymakers, and the general public."

Also gone from the EPA's website is a page devoted to the Clean Power Planinitiated by the Obama administration. The Trump administration is actively pursuing the repeal of the regulation aimed at curbing carbon emissions.

An EPApage devoted to educating children, the Student’s Guide to Climate Change, has also been moved from the EPA's homepage and now resides buried deep on the site in a subdomain.

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EPA spokesperson Jahan Wilcox told weather.com in an email thatthe agency is "constantly updating our website to reflect new initiatives and projects of the agency."

"Of course, the site will be reflective of the current administration’s priorities – with that said, all the content from the previous administration is still easily accessible and publicly available through the banner across the top of the main page of the site,” Wilcox added.

Other agencies havefollowed a similar pattern of removing or burying climate change discussion and data, the report notes.

The authors of the study pointout that, in many cases, the information and raw data is still available but has just become more difficult to access.

“The data is certainly less accessible. Links to websites that host the data have been removed. That on the agency’s websites," co-author Toly Rinberg told the New York Times.

The suppression of information on human-induced climate change by the Trump administrationhas not been limited to government websites.

In October, three EPA scientists scheduled to speak about their work on climate change at a conference in Rhode Island were suddenly removed from the event.

"It's definitely a blatant example of the scientific censorship we all suspected was going to start being enforced at EPA,” John King, a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island,.

The authors of the report question why "these federal agencies (are) putting so much effort into ‘science cleansing’ instead of using time and resources to fulfill agency responsibilities, such as protecting the environment and advancing energy security?"

"Removing information regarding climate change from federal websites does not affect the reality of climate change, but may serve to obfuscate the subject and inject doubt regarding the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that it is caused by human activity,” the authors said.