At least 10 countries pledged to uphold “information integrity” at COP30, vowing to “ensure accurate and reliable” climate coverage and promote information related to “the principles of the Paris Agreement,” according to the United Nations.
A joint initiative between the UN, the Brazilian government and UNESCO launched the “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change” at COP30 “to counter the growing impact of disinformation, misinformation, denialism.” The initiative calls for nations to “support the sustainability of a diverse and resilient media ecosystem to ensure accurate and reliable coverage on climate and environmental issues.”
“The Declaration calls on governments, the private sector, civil society, academia and funders to take concrete action to counter the growing impact of disinformation, misinformation, denialism and deliberate attacks on environmental journalists, defenders, scientists and researchers that undermine climate action and threaten societal stability,” the UN website states.
The UN notes on its website that the “initiative aims to enhance public trust in climate science [and] reduce the spread of mis/disinformation” and that nations are expected to “promote” information in line with “the principles of the Paris Agreement.”
“Without access to reliable information about climate disruption we can never hope to overcome it,” UNESCO’s Director-General Audrey Azoulay said on Wednesday. “Through this initiative, we will support the journalists and researchers investigating climate issues, sometimes at great risk to themselves, and fight the climate-related disinformation running rampant on social media.”
The UN has compiled information on “attacks” environmental journalists have suffered from, including physical and legal attacks as well as “online harassment.”
“Prioritizing information integrity refers to … an information ecosystem in which reliable and accurate information is available to all, enabling people to engage meaningfully in public life, make informed decisions and exercise their rights,” Senior Adviser on Information Integrity Charlotte Scaddan told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Freedom of expression and access to information is at the heart of information integrity. People should be able to access a range of information sources both on and offline.”
Notably, an official said at a September 2022 World Economic Forum panel that the UN “partnered with Google” so that “all kinds of UN resources” would show up on a climate change-related Google search.
“We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled climate change, we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top,” UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming said on the panel. “We’re becoming much more proactive. You know, we own the science and we think that the world should know it and the platforms themselves also do. But again, it’s a huge, huge challenge that I think all sectors of society need to be very active in.”
Some critics like Marc Morano, author and publisher of Climatedepot.com, argue that the initiative might be used to censor views dissenting from the UN’s.
“Here we go again. Yet another attempt by the United Nations to squelch free speech and scientific debate over issues which they declare have been long ‘settled,’” Morano told the DCNF. “Just a few years ago, the UN declared that they ‘owned the science’ and were partnering with Google in order to suppress dissent. Never in history have the ‘good guys’ been the ones that want to shut down free speech.”
President Donald Trump moved to exit the United States from the Paris Agreement through a day-one executive order and his administration skipped the UN climate conference this year. Trump also called climate change policy the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” in front of the United Nations General Assembly in September.
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