The Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change is crowdsourcing concrete solutions to address disinformation and related tactics seeking to delay and derail climate action. 

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The COP30 Presidency has called on governments, civil society, academia, and the private sector to submit concrete initiatives that promote information integrity in addressing climate change disinformation.

The Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change, established by UNESCO, the UN and the Brazilian government, is crowdsourcing concrete solutions to address disinformation and related tactics seeking to delay and derail climate action, to be submitted by August 31. Selected initiatives will be presented at the global COP30 conference in November.

Despite widespread agreement by experts around the world and increasing attempts to raise the alarm, vast swaths of the general public are still confused or apathetic about climate change. 

In the US, for example, more than a third of adults are not at all concerned about climate change, as emerged in a survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and published earlier this year. Among those who agree that it exists, only 60% think it is caused by human activity. This trend is set to increase as mainstream media around the world have made a dramatic shift away from covering the topic during the past year.

According to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, media coverage of climate change or global warming in newspapers around the globe in June of this year dropped 28% compared to June 2024.

The first-ever UN Global Risk Report released this month also named mis- and disinformation the world’s top vulnerability, while environmental risks represent five of the top 10 most important risks across all regions.

The COP30 presidency’s initiative, which brings together the UN, UNESCO, UNFCCC, Brazil, and six other countries – Chile, Denmark, France, Morocco, the United Kingdom, and Sweden – along with civil society partners – represents the first time the issue of information integrity has been included in the COP Action Agenda. 

At the G20 Leaders’ Summit where the initiative was launched, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for strengthening action against “coordinated disinformation campaigns impeding global progress on climate change, ranging from outright denial to greenwashing to harassment of climate scientists.”

Last year, the UN chief called on countries to ban fossil fuel advertising in the same way they restricted tobacco.

“Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action – with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns. They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies – Mad Men fuelling the madness,” Guterres said.

Public confusion also directly impacts how governments regulate greenhouse gas emissions and support solutions. “Worldwide, there are influential people who keep denying that the world is facing climate threats, which has slowed down the implementation of policy measures and actions that can tackle the climate crisis for humankind,” Edwin Lau, founder of The Green Earth, told Earth.Org in an emailed response.

The call-to-action – “mutirão”, Portuguese for “joint effort” – seeks existing actions in areas including:

• Research on disinformation and other threats to climate information integrity
• Tools and methods to promote climate information integrity
• Communication strategies and campaigns
• Support for environmental journalism
• Protecting scientific data and data sets related to climate change
• Transparency in the advertising supply chain
• Media, information and digital literacy related to climate change

COP30 will take place in Belém, Brazil, from November 10 to 21, 2025. Interested organizations can access the application form until August 31, 2025.

Finding the Right Communication Approach

Experts are divided as to what types of initiatives will be most effective. 

In an email to Earth.Org, podcaster Michael Gold of Climate Swings predicted, “Inspiring, uplifting stories about people doing awesome things are always going to land better than wonky scientific explanations or doom-and-gloom narratives about the end of the world.” This is an approach popularized by climate optimists like Anne Therese Gennari, author of The Climate Optimist Handbook, and Abby Hopper, CEO of Solar Energy Industries Association.

However, according to a 2024 report from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), fundamental facts are even more important. According to this analysis, climate deniers on mega platforms such as YouTube have recently moved from an older approach of denying global warming and its causes to a “new denial” where they claim that climate solutions will not work and that climate science and the climate movement are themselves unreliable. 

In a speech earlier this year, CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed said, “The climate crisis isn’t just a scientific or political issue, it’s a communications issue. If lies spread unchecked, actions will stall.” 

More on the topic: YouTube Makes up to $13.4 Million a Year From Videos Containing Climate Denial Narratives that Undermine Green Solutions, Watchdog Says  

Likewise, INTOSAI, the working group on environmental auditing, has highlighted the need for “Supreme Audit Institutions” to present data-driven insights and clear, evidence-based analysis to counter denialist claims.

Effective solutions are likely to require both of these approaches, reflecting the multiple, aggressive strategies of denialism and conspiracy theorists. In a LinkedIn post this week, renowned climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe noted that most climate denial falls into one of five general categories: it’s not real; it’s not us; it’s not bad; we can’t fix it; it’s too late. 

Existing actions around climate information integrity include support for climate journalism, academic initiatives such as the Yale Program on Climate Communication, and meta-analyses on climate change information. Along with this, an increasing number of programs such as the Hollywood Climate Summit and the Climate Fiction Writers League also support the inclusion of climate information in popular film and fiction.

Featured image: Mark Dixon/Flickr.

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The COP30 Local Leaders Forum will be held in Rio de Janeiro from November 3-5, aiming to link the global agenda of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its COPs with local realities.

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Local leaders will gather in Rio de Janeiro for three days ahead of this November’s COP30 summit in Belém, focusing on how cities, states, and regions can accelerate progress on global climate goals, the COP30 Presidency and Bloomberg Philanthropies have announced.

Michael R. Bloomberg, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and COP30 CEO Ana Toni unveiled the initiative at London Climate Action Week on Tuesday. Bloomberg, a businessman who served as mayor of New York City for more than a decade, also chairs the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.

The COP30 Local Leaders Forum – a meeting of city mayors, provincial governors, and other local leaders from cities, states and provinces around the world – will be held in Rio de Janeiro from November 3-5. It aims to link the global agenda of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its COPs with local realities. These include urban issues such as housing, mobility, sanitation, urban development, disaster risk reduction, and green infrastructure. 

The event will bring together several global conferences under one roof, including the C40 World Mayors Summit, the Global States and Regions Summit, the Local Leaders Awards Ceremony, the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnership (CHAMP) High Level Political Dialogue, and the America Is All In Exchange.

“To hit the targets under the Paris climate agreement, nations must do more, faster — and cities and states are leading the way. By teaming up with Brasil to bring together forward-thinking mayors and governors, we’re putting local action at the heart of international efforts — and laying the groundwork for more progress at COP30,” Bloomberg said in a statement. 

Worldwide, cities already account for 75% of global energy consumption and its resulting emissions, a figure set to increase as urbanization accelerates. At the same time, cities will be impacted by climate change: by 2050, ten urban areas in the Global South can expect up to 8 million migrants if emissions do not fall, while over 800 million people, living in 570 cities, will be vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal flooding. In Brazil, which will host the upcoming meeting, 87% of the population already lives in urban areas.

Christine Loh, an Asia climate leader who convened the 2010 C40 Cities summit, emphasized that global cooperation is needed to ensure local needs are met. “There is a realization that decarbonizing cities, where the bulk of our populations live, is where urgent action is needed. [But] Asian cities are very different from North American and European cities – on the whole, Asian cities have much higher population densities, and the richer cities are also much more vertical with high-rises. These conditions require different solutions – hence Asian cities need to share their experiences with each other,” she told Earth.Org in an emailed response.

Along with the meetings and high level exchange sessions, a series of innovation events will also take place at the November event. Following the forum, a delegation of local leaders will travel to Belém to connect the events in Rio to COP30 by formally representing a unified subnational climate agenda at COP30.

The summit, scheduled for November 10-21, will bring together world leaders to review ongoing efforts to address climate change.

Featured image: Carlos Ortega/Flickr.

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Follow Earth.Org’s COP30 updates.

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At November’s COP30 climate conference in Belém, Brazil, gender will be a major focus topic. But why should action on climate change, which affects every person on the planet, require a specific action plan related to gender?

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“Of all of the big problems, the biggest is the assumption that climate change is not a gender issue,” Mwanahamisi Singano, Director of Policy, Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WeDo), told Earth.Org. “Women have direct dependency on nature, so the changing environment impacts them.” 

According to Singano, women often lack access to climate change information, finance, adaptive abilities and capacities, as well as alternative means of livelihood. “When they are impacted, women are not as mobile as men. When the rain doesn’t fall, the father can migrate to the city and find a day wage job, but women with a family can’t easily do that. They are the first ones to suffer a shortage of food from a changing environment and changing patterns,” she said. 

A review of the UN Sustainable Development Goals found that by 2050, climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into extreme poverty (US$2.15 per day), 16 million more than men and boys. At the same time, WeDo found that women are often only thought of as victims, even though they have a great deal to offer as solution providers. 

As the Women and Gender Constituency Co-focal Point, Singano is on the frontlines of the interaction between climate change and gender. At COP30, to be held this November in Belém, Brazil, gender will be one of the major topics on the agenda. In particular, a decision is expected at this year’s conference on a new Gender Action Plan.

Since 2011, and shortly before COP17, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has recognized the Women and Gender Group as an official interest group in the COP process. The roots of the Gender Action Plan stretch back to COP20, which took place in 2014 in Lima, Peru. There, the first Lima work program on gender, later known as the LWPG, was established, aiming “to advance gender balance and integrate gender considerations … so as to achieve gender responsive climate policy and action.” The LWPG was long-term and open-ended, rather than a concrete list of specific actions. 

At subsequent meetings, the plan was extended and enhanced with thematic days, but no agreement was achieved. Finally, at last year’s COP29, the parties decided to develop an entirely new Gender Action Plan, aiming to be adopted at COP30. “There will be a big decision coming out at COP in Belém on the Gender Action Plan,” explained Singano. “It has to translate the work program, create concrete milestones, say who has to do what, and what the party or secretariat has to do to advance gender.”

Priority areas for the new Gender Action Plan include capacity building, knowledge management and communication, gender balance, participation and women’s leadership, coherence, gender-responsive implementation and means of implementation, and monitoring and reporting. In particular, the plan is expected to address advancing access to finance and gender – including funding for the plan itself – and closing the gap in gender-specific climate data. 

However, a number of important milestones need to be reached before a decision can be made on the plan in Belém. 

The window for all of the parties – the signatories of the Paris Climate Agreement – to make submissions related to the new gender action plan ended on March 31, 2025, and a summary of these submissions is expected to be published in mid May. Following this, the development of the new plan will begin in earnest at one of the intermediate negotiation sessions that happen in between COP events, known as the Subsidiary Body sessions. An important round of negotiations on the plan will take place at the Subsidiary Body session in June 2025 in Bonn, Germany, reviewing the design, structure and content of the plan. 

Gender is also an important aspect of another focus area for COP30 – the so-called “Just Transition”, the commitment introduced in 2023 to ensuring that no one is left behind or pushed behind in the transition to low-carbon and environmentally sustainable economies and societies. 

In line with the Just Transition approach, individual countries have included gender topics in their long-term low-emission development strategies; a recent analysis by the World Resources Institute showed that 25% of these strategies had a gender equity chapter described in detail. In a statement, Brazil’s Minister of Women Cida Goncalves said, “More than a result for COP30, Brasil’s real legacy at this summit will be the inclusion of a gender perspective and women’s rights as a foundation for addressing the climate crisis and promoting a just transition.” 

Solutions in these plans should include a gender lens in order to be effective, according to Singano. “A classical example is that most of the land is owned by men, and women can’t invest in land that is not theirs. So if we are going to subsidize irrigation equipment, it’s unlikely that women will take the opportunity. Or when we are doing training in the evening, you find that during these times women don’t come because they are busy doing household work.”

The role of women in creating solutions is highlighted in the climate solution awards, held annually by Women Engage for a Common Future and presented during the COP sessions. For example, in one case from Senegal, women had been generating income by smoking fish with mangrove charcoal. When the government banned mangrove harvesting, the women created a mangrove conservation that would keep the mangroves healthy while retaining their income generation activities. 

The role of culture and gender in climate change is also under consideration for the upcoming Gender Action Plan. In a seminar in April, Rosilena Lindo, Advisor and Former Secretary of Energy of the Government of Panama, referenced a local capacity building process with Indigenous women aiming to ensure they had access to renewable electricity as well as resources to start their own companies. However, “As they were used to not being the head of the family, this started disputes among families and communities.”

Lindo explained: “When you start to intervene in a community, you can’t do it by isolating one person in the family. You have to provide psychosocial support and new opportunities, depending on their traditions. The top down approaches always contribute to that loss of culture and traditional practices.”

Featured image: Karen Toro/Climate Visuals Countdown.

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Following news reports of a potential conflict of interest for global communications firm Edelman, the role of communications at COP30 is creating controversy – putting the rising importance of strategic climate storytelling at odds with conventional approaches. 

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Global communications firm Edelman faced criticism last month for its work representing the Brazilian soy industry, as it is under consideration for the lead communications agency role at the upcoming COP30 climate summit. 

Edelman states on its website that it supports clients in advancing a just and equitable energy transition, operating under the guidance of its six Climate Principles. However, like most PR firms, it does not list all clients there. 

Public relations firms vary in their level of disclosure about what clients they serve. 170 agencies produce client disclosure reports following standards such as the Client Disclosure Reporting guideline. 

Michael Gold, founder of climate communications consultancy Word Clouds Consulting, said strategic communication is “an underrated tool for climate action.”

“COP30 represents a critical inflection point for climate communication. Rather than treating it as just another climate summit, communicators should position it as a measurable accountability moment for the Paris Agreement,” he said. 

However, industry specialists dispute how realistic it is to expect a global firm to avoid such clients, while highlighting the importance of professional expertise in the discipline. 

“The climate summit faces a dilemma: to deliver the global communications support necessary for an event of this magnitude, it becomes nearly impossible to completely exclude major PR firms with client portfolios that include fossil fuel interests,” Arun Sudhaman, a global PR industry analyst, told Earth.Org, adding that many of those firm may be “far less transparent” than Edelman about that kind of work. 

But beyond the task of delivering information on the COP30 event itself, communications experts agree that the more important issue is to leverage storytelling to create better public empowerment on climate action.

“What I wish is that even a percentage of the money that was being spent on PR for COP30 was being spent on public empowerment,” said Solitaire Townsend, a member of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) Entertainment and Culture for Climate Action Committee. She argues that storytelling “is the secret key to unlock massive action everywhere.” 

“We know what we need to do on finance, policy, and technology – IPCC themselves have set out exactly what we need to do. What we’re missing is the story. We have the logic, but we need the magic,” Townsend told Earth.Org.

Article 12 of the UNFCCC enjoins the parties to cooperate in taking measures to enhance climate change public awareness, public participation and public access to information. Carbon pricing and carbon markets, anticipated to be central issues at COP30, face many challenges such as fundamental understanding, acceptance of the concept, and perceived fairness. 

According to Paul Mottram, an independent consultant focused on climate and author of Carbon Costs, these are all complex communications issues rather than technical problems; and, as such, professional communication is crucial to addressing them. 

“Multiple surveys have shown that climate change is now seen as a real threat, one people think will affect them,” he said. “But the best slogans, like ‘Just Stop Oil,’ don’t correspond to real solutions. That’s the critical problem that climate communications needs to solve.”

One opportunity could be to leverage rising consumption of independent media. 

Gold, who also hosts the Climate Swings podcast, explained that podcasters and other independent media creators have a “unique opportunity” to highlight human stories while also making high-level negotiations accessible to the public. 

The need for strategic communication on climate is likely to rise in the near future. According to the World PR Report 2024-2025 by industry body ICCO, sustainability and climate change were the most important social issues that clients were most likely to prioritize.

Featured image: Vugar Ibadov via Flickr.

You might also like: Framing a Crisis: The Evolution of Climate Communication and Storytelling

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“A country may step back – but others are already stepping into their place to seize that opportunity,” Simon Stiell said on Thursday, referring to the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

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The transition to clean energy is “unstoppable” as countries recognize the “colossal” benefits it presents, the UN climate chief said in his first speech of the year.

Speaking at a university in Brazil on Thursday, Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said countries were “already stepping into their place to “reap the massive rewards” of transitioning to cleaner forms of energy, such as new jobs, reduced pollution and associated health costs, economic growth, and more affordable energy.

“A country may step back – but others are already stepping into their place to seize that opportunity,” he said, adding that the energy transition is “unstoppable.”

Stiell was referring to the US, which President Donald Trump last month withdrew from the Paris climate deal for the second time, calling the agreement an “unfair, one-sided … rip-off.” The move places the country – the world’s second largest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases – alongside Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only countries in the world outside the accord.

In November, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that progress on the Paris Agreement could suffer a major setback if the US were to leave the international treaty for a second time.

‘Get Finance Right’

On Thursday, Stiell outlined his top policy priorities for this year and for COP30, the UN annual climate summit, set to take place in November in Belem, Brazil.

Last year, countries agreed on a $300-billion global climate finance deal, which Stiell called “an important step forward.” But Global South negotiators described the deal as a “joke” and “insultingly low.” They had been pushing for “trillions, not billions” throughout the summit, after experts put the amount needed to deal with the consequences of climate change at some $1.3 trillion annually.

A coalition of least developed countries and small island developing states at COP29 also secured language in the final text that establishes a process to boost climate finance towards $1.3 trillion. That effort will be part of a “Baku to Belem Roadmap to $1.3 trillion,” which will look for additional resources to “support support low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development pathways.”

Stiell said the world has mobilized around $2 trillion in climate finance from “nearly nothing” over the last decade. “Imagine if we could get finance right; as a start, deliver on the Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3 trillion dollars – so that every nation can begin reaching its full potential,” he said.

10 Years

This year marks a decade since 195 countries signed the Paris accord, one of the most significant climate agreements to strengthen the global response to the growing threat of climate change.

Signatories committed to limiting global warming to below 1.5C or “well below 2C” above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Beyond this limit, experts warn that critical tipping points will be breached, leading to devastating and potentially irreversible consequences for several vital Earth systems that sustain a hospitable planet.

Stiell on Thursday praised the work of the UN in driving global climate cooperation, saying the world would otherwise be headed towards up to 5C of heating, “a death sentence for humanity as we know it.” He said that while the world has become more divided in the past decade, the climate negotiation process has “managed to buck the trend.”

But progress does not mean the world is on track with the Paris goal. Far from it, the UN last year warned we are on track for a temperature increase of 2.6-3.1C over the course of this century.

2024 was the hottest year on record, and the first one to surpass 1.5C. While recent developments do not signal a permanent breach of the critical limit, which scientists say is measured over decades, it sends a clear warning to humanity that we are approaching the point of no return much faster than expected.

Scientists are not optimistic either. A survey of 380 IPCC scientists conducted by the Guardian last May revealed that 77% of them believe humanity is headed for at least 2.5C of warming.

And on Monday, renowned climatologist James Hansen said even the 2C target “is dead” after his latest paper concluded that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. The former top NASA climate scientist famously announced to the US Congress in 1988 that global warming was underway.⁣

Featured image: UNclimatechange/Flickr.

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Only 27% of national policy plans to tackle climate change have a strong focus on urban priorities, despite the potential of cities to help achieve climate targets.

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National policy plans to drive sustainability and emissions reduction must put greater emphasis on urban priorities and climate action ahead of next year’s COP30, a new UN study has warned.

The report, published Wednesday by UN-Habitat, UNDP, and the UNESCO Chair on Urban Resilience at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU.Resilience), analyzed the climate commitments of 194 countries party to the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world’s first comprehensive climate agreement that set out a framework for limiting global warming to below 1.5C or “well below 2C” above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. 

Under the Agreement, each signatory country submits its own plan for emissions reductions, known as a Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), in line with the overall targets. They are required to update them every five years, with the next revision due at COP30 in late 2025.

Using approximately 200 indicators, researchers examined the latest NDCs of all 194 countries submitted in June 2023 and categorized them into three broad clusters based on the level of urban elements: strong, moderate, and low or no urban content.

Home to 56% of the global population, cities are responsible for 70% of global primary energy consumption and 60% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making them key players to achieving the Paris Agreement targets. And yet, the study found that only 27% of NDCs – mostly from low- and middle-income countries including China, Colombia, Morocco, India, South Africa, and Turkey – had a strong focus, meaning urban sectors were featured prominently and identified as a priority. Despite the low proportion, this still represented a 14% increase compared to 2016.

39% had moderate levels of urban content and the remaining 35% had low to no mention, including high-income and highly urbanized countries and regions such as Canada, Japan, the European Union, and the United States, along with Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

The results underscore the missed opportunity of many countries to target urban centers in their efforts to achieve decarbonization targets. Cities are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat, and sea level rise. Low-income and marginalized communities are disproportionately affected as they possess weak adaptive capacities to react to these climate changes.

Only through investments in robust and effective adaptation and mitigation strategies can cities hope to withstand these impacts. And yet, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 6th Assessment Report (AR6), US$384 billion has so far been spent on climate action in urban areas, representing just 10% of what is necessary to build low-carbon and climate-resilient cities.

“The science is clear,” said Michal Mlynár, Acting Executive Director of UN-Habitat. “Current urbanization processes drive greenhouse gas emissions and leave urban infrastructure and citizens extremely vulnerable to climate change. Yet, we can increasingly see that the right policy and planning decisions can make cities and communities resilient, and that carbon neutral urban development is possible. The NDCs must provide the framework for accelerated urban climate action.”

Water-related hazards were the most frequently mentioned urban climate hazards in the NDCs analyzed. These include floods, droughts, sea level rise, and storm events. Heat is also increasingly affecting urban centers as temperatures rise, especially during the summer months. A recent study found that climate change added 26 days of excess extreme heat in 2023.

Urbanization only worsens the issue. As more people move into cities, they replace natural vegetation and soil with buildings, roads, and other impervious surfaces that absorb and re-emit more heat, creating a so-called urban heat island effect. 

Stress on human bodies caused by heat prevents normal daily activities and our ability to cool down properly. Areas that generally have more humidity can also put lives at risk. Sweat helps our bodies cool off, but humidity changes the way sweat evaporates from the body. Not being able to cool down puts people’s health at risk, and can lead to increased cardiovascular and respiratory complications, dehydration, heatstroke, higher blood pressure, and sleep deprivation. Some of these conditions can be deadly if not treated promptly.

More on the topic: How Cities Around the World Are Tackling the Urban Heat Crisis

With COP30 less than a year away, the UN is urging countries to step up their efforts.

 “As countries embark on developing the third generation of NDCs, it is crucial to ensure urban climate solutions comprise a key place in all climate strategies. Although there is a rising emphasis on cities in climate mitigation and adaptation efforts, we can do more,” said Marcos Neto, Assistant Secretary-General and Director of UNDP’s Bureau of Policy and Programme Support.

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