Disinformation threatens climate action, UN warns

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

BAKU, Azerbaijan—Misleading and false climate content surging through social media and other channels threatens the COP29 climate talks by undermining science-based policy decisions, United Nations officials said.

“We are at the point where the issue of disinformation, the intentional spread of inaccurate information, has been recognized as an urgent threat by the international community at the highest level,” Martina Donlon, head of the climate section of the United Nations department of global communications in New York, said at a Nov. 20 press conference in Baku.

She said a U.N. initiative to tackle the problem, which ranges from outright denial and greenwashing to harassment of climate scientists, is growing quickly. Member countries from three continents, as well as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and U.N. entities like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization, have signed on to the effort, she said. 

The plan to tackle climate disinformation stems from a commitment in the U.N.’s Global Digital Compact that encourages member countries to assess impacts of mis-and disinformation on global sustainability goals.

In 2022, another report highlighted a similar threat to the COP27 climate talks in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where critics said the fossil fuel industry rode the wave of disinformation to try to slow progress toward any agreement that might reduce the production and use of oil, gas and coal.

“The climate information ecosystem has been compromised by the relentless onslaught of disinformation campaigns orchestrated and amplified by powerful actors,” said Alex Murray, who works with two watchdog groups, the Conscious Advertising Network and Climate Action Against Disinformation, to figure out ways to fight the spread of false information. 

His words could have been aimed directly at individuals like Elon Musk, who, after buying Twitter in 2022, reinstated accounts that had previously been banned for spreading disinformation about climate and other topics. Most prominent among those is Donald Trump himself, who has often posted on social media that climate change is a hoax.

Since the purchase, the number of accounts promoting climate denial have increased and their reach has grown, while posts from climate scientists sharing legitimate information have been throttled, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, whose 2021 book, The New Climate War, deeply analyzed the issue of climate dis- and misinformation. 

“I don’t think there can be any reasonable dispute that Elon Musk enabled the proliferation of climate disinformation on Twitter when he purchased it, with assistance from Russia and Saudi Arabia,” he said. “And he proceeded to alter the algorithm in ways that enabled the weaponization of climate disinformation.”

Musk himself has also posted inaccurate statements about climate that were quickly slammed by researchers as having no scientific basis, including in 2023 when he claimed farming has no impact on the climate.

“The impact of this is that it has obstructed climate action, created division, reduced trust and disrupted progress on climate action,” Murray said.

Disinformation Can Affect Elections

Disinformation can lead to public confusion and even influence the outcome of national elections, which can also affect the annual global climate summits if it leads to the selection of leaders who reject international collaboration and climate action, said Sean Buchan, a researcher with Climate Action Against Disinformation.

“This is designed to make delegations nervous about negotiations,” he said. When coupled with increased greenwashing and promotion of questionable climate solutions like carbon offsets, the disinformation seems “designed to confuse and change minds,” he added. “We are increasingly concerned that this is having an effect on discussions and outcomes at COPs.”

Leading up to COP29 and previous global climate talks, Murray said researchers with the watchdog groups have tracked an influx of outside voices trying to undermine the process and the scientific consensus that it’s based on.

Alexander Saier, who leads the media and digital communications team for the UNFCCC, said climate disinformation is taking over social media spaces and undermining climate action with false narratives that frame climate action as elitist and disconnected from public needs.

“We need to ensure we avoid giving the impression that we are focused on stuff that we just disagree with,” he said. Efforts to prevent disinformation must be focused on things that are factually wrong, with the goal of ensuring that solid scientific data is the backbone of this multilateral process and informs political decision making, he added.

Murray said the U.N. initiative to fight disinformation started coming together in 2021, ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, and he noted that both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the European Union have acknowledged the impact of disinformation on science-based decision making. In its global climate science assessment of 2022, the IPCC wrote that the “deliberate undermining of science” was contributing to “misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent.”

It’s important to understand the systemic incentives for spreading disinformation, Murray said. Major platforms like Facebook and Google generate most of their revenues from advertising. Anything that encourages users to stay on the site longer drives up that revenue, and sensationalized disinformation surrounding climate does that.

As an example, he cited viral posts by far-right Christian social media influencers in Brazil claiming that the May flooding along the Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil was God’s punishment for what they called the satanic content of Madonna’s outdoor concert in Rio de Janeiro earlier the same month.

The hoaxes are amplified because, “too often, fear and falsehoods travel faster than facts,” Murray said. It is important to distinguish between such hoaxes and genuine concerns that people have about climate, and to engage with communities about those fears with fact-based responses, he added.

How to Counter Climate Lies

Similarly, in the months leading up to the U.S. election, false claims about the causes of wildfires and hurricanes spread through the information ecosystem, generating huge amounts of traffic and therefore ad revenue for the platforms.

Among the solutions the groups are looking at are ways to improve the transparency of the moderation practices used by high-traffic platforms and of the algorithms that drive traffic, he said. Transparency requirements do not hinder free speech, he added.

“We need democratic regulation of this,” Murray said. “We need to support media literacy. And finally, … we need climate journalism. That is critical, and we need to make sure it’s well-funded and not subject to de-platforming or being removed by algorithms.”

Donlon said more research on how false narratives spread is critical, because that knowledge can be turned into actions that slow or eliminate the spread of false information.

Buchan, the Climate Action Against Disinformation researcher, noted that some major mainstream media outlets like Fox News and the Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom are also guilty of spreading false climate information that conflicts with scientific facts. And at the COPs themselves, the growing number of fossil fuel lobbyists is helping to spread that misleading information to the very heart of international efforts to stop global warming, he added.

Buchan said preliminary research suggests the June 2024 European Union elections were affected by disinformation about environmental regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. The disinformation drove farmer protests, which in turn helped boost the electoral chances of far-right parties that often favor turning back the clock on climate policies and rules.

“It’s not necessarily like anyone is sitting at a table going, ‘Hahaha, look at all this disinformation,’” he said. “But it just happens to work this way because our information ecosystem is very clouded and doesn’t have the right guardrails in place to stop these sorts of exploitations from happening.”