“This is the moment to impose a new defeat on the deniers,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the opening of the climate summit being celebrated in the Amazonian city of Belém, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30). In his intervention before the plenary session of this international conference, the representative directly addressed misinformation and social network algorithms that spread evidence against scientific evidence at a time when climate change is affecting all parts of the planet. These 1,000 countries have united in an alliance against the denial-inducing misinformation that has been installed in many centers of power, starting with Casablanca.
Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Uruguay issued a declaration, sponsored by the United Nations and UNESCO, raising concerns about “the growing influence of disinformation, misinformation, denial, deliberate attacks against journalists, advocates, scientists, researchers and other public environmental voices and other tactics used to undermine the integrity of climate change information.” Warning that these practices “reduce public understanding, delay urgent action, and weaken the global climate response and social stability.”
Signatories commit to funding projects that address these practices – Brazil has contributed more than $1 million to this initiative – and to “promote informed and inclusive climate action” with “equitable access to accurate, consistent, evidence-based and comprehensive information on climate change.” And also requiring technology companies to “evaluate” whether their algorithm design contributes to “undermining the integrity of the climate information ecosystem.” Moreover, they complain to the private sector in general that it ensures “transparent and responsible advertising practices with human rights that promote the integrity of information about climate change and support reliable information and journalism.”
This declaration, which is open to more countries, is the result of the Global Initiative for Safety in Climate Change Information. As a result of this project, a special fund was launched in June to finance initiatives that received 447 proposals from nearly 100 countries. The Declaration of this Century urges all nations to contribute to this Fund. “Increasing threats to information integrity represent one of the defining challenges of our time, weakening the foundations of public debate and public trust and undermining the ability of communities to build collective solutions,” the statement concludes.
This time in particular, ClientEarth, which has focused on the use of law as a form of environmental warfare, presented at the climate summit a report along the same lines as the declaration that countries signed in this decade. “Platforms prioritize, amplify and encourage climate-related misinformation,” the study warns. This means that you do not comply, for example, with the EU Digital Services Act obligations.
“Climate misinformation is being used to obstruct climate action,” warns the ClientEarth website, which cites fossil fuel companies and their associated companies for using “sophisticated tactics to undermine decades of work to create consensus and drive action at the international, national and local levels.” They are joined by “other actors” who “simply seek to profit from the anger economy.” “In a short time, climate misinformation and misinformation pose a risk to citizens facing the impacts of extreme weather caused or exacerbated by climate change,” says this organization. “In the long term, this erodes public confidence and political will to urgently take the necessary measures to prevent the worst impacts of climate change,” the study concluded.
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