Climate disinformation is a growing geopolitical threat, targeting public understanding of climate risks, undermining trust and threatening global climate goals. For the EU, this challenge presents an opportunity to step up as a global leader – coordinating internationally, supporting partners and investing in tools to safeguard information integrity.
Climate disinformation presents a major geopolitical challenge, one that is escalating in scale and impact. Earlier campaigns primarily focused on discrediting climate science, but today’s efforts are broader and more sophisticated. Hostile states, fossil fuel interests and new AI-driven manipulation techniques can increasingly target public understanding of climate risks, push deceptive narratives on the costs of climate action and sow mistrust in international cooperation. These dynamics now directly threaten global progress on climate goals, in addition to societal cohesion. At COP30, the Brazilian presidency placed information integrity on the climate agenda for the first time and launched the Global Initiative for Information Integrity, marking a milestone in the seriousness of this threat.
For the EU, climate disinformation can undermine the EU’s ability to build domestic support for climate policies and provides an opening for hostile actors to frame EU climate diplomacy as coercive. The EU already brings considerable tools to this challenge as a first mover on technology and digital services regulations, growing Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) monitoring within the European External Action Service (EEAS) and supporting fact-checking and media literacy. Yet, the magnitude of this challenge requires the EU to take more global leadership – in coordination with international organisations and allies. Multilateral institutions are beginning to treat information integrity as a core pillar of climate cooperation, but implementation still has a long way to go.
At the same time, climate disinformation capabilities from some allies are shrinking. The Trump Administration closed the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which was the central U.S. government body responsible for identifying, analysing and coordinating responses to foreign information manipulation. The GEC had played a key role in supporting allies and civil society, as well as developing tools to detect deepfakes and other forms of deception. Its closure potentially creates a substantial gap in the international response to threats to information integrity. This absence could increase the risk that disinformation campaigns, particularly on issues like climate and energy, spread unchecked.
This landscape presents both a challenge and an opportunity for the EU. It is now more urgent for the EU and its Member States to step forward, strengthen coordination and ensure that the EU and partner countries can challenge disinformation effectively, especially in the face of new technology like AI.
To match the scale of the threat, the EU can expand its global role in fighting climate disinformation by:
- deepening cooperation multilaterally,
- enhancing support for partner countries,
- improving strategic communication and
- investing in tools that protect the integrity of information on climate action worldwide.
This briefing was developed with funding from the European Climate Foundation (ECF).
