Focus area
Climate Change
We help climate teams understand how the debate is moving, position themselves within it, and act with evidence. We cover audience and narrative research, early detection of emerging misinformation, advocacy and campaign strategy, and team trainings.
CHALLENGES
False and misleading claims obstruct public understanding of the scale and causes of climate change, and they delay action on it. They come from different places. Sometimes from people sharing something they believe to be true, sometimes from interest groups and political actors running coordinated campaigns against climate action. They move between platforms, languages and countries, and they rise around elections, global political moments and extreme weather events.
The claims themselves have changed. What is now called new denialism says less about whether climate change is happening and more against the solutions, the science behind them, and the people who defend them. That shift is harder to counter, because it attaches itself to real questions about cost, fairness and disruption.
Why it matters
Information integrity is now recognised as a condition for climate action. At COP30 in November 2025, the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change, launched by Brazil, the United Nations and UNESCO, presented its Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change, endorsed by 27 countries and the European Union.
Climate is also not discussed the same way everywhere. The same issue is a question of science in one country, of security or economic opportunity in another, and of livelihoods in a third. What people hear depends on their country, their language and their platform, which means a message built needs to be tailored to various contexts.
How we work
Understanding how climate is discussed, and by whom
We analyse news and social media to show how a topic is framed in each country, which arguments reach which audiences, and who shapes the conversation. This becomes the basis for messaging, media strategy and the choice of spokespeople.
Asking people directly
Representative surveys, qualitative research and community feedback show what people believe, trust and need, including those who never post.
Seeing new narratives early
Our Misinformation Virality Detector reads how content is constructed instead of matching it against known claims, so it catches narratives nobody has catalogued yet and estimates how far each will travel. We also separate claims shared in good faith from campaigns built to mislead, because one needs a better explanation and the other needs exposure.
Positioning, messaging and campaigns
We help organisations define their role, map the stakeholders worth engaging and plan around moments such as COP. Our team combines public policy communications, environmental science and regional expertise, including in Brazil and Latin America.
Building internal capability
Training for climate teams, researchers and spokespeople, prebunking before moments such as COP, and simulations to plan a campaign.
Our work in practice
Extreme weather and disaster response
We follow public conversation during natural disasters and extreme weather events, including in Nepal, the floods in Pakistan, earthquakes in South America and heatwaves across South Asia. The purpose is the same each time: show teams what affected people are asking, where rumours are spreading and which information gaps need filling while the response is still underway. Much of this runs through i-Hear-U, the social and community listening platform we built for UNICEF and first deployed in Nepal in 2022.
Narrative analysis for Arctic and ocean campaigns
We analyse how the Arctic and the ocean are discussed, so that campaign teams build on how people already talk about them. For Only One, we analysed the Arctic across Europe, North America and Asia, covering online news and seven social platforms across thirteen countries, through four themes: science, security, industry and First Nations. With the stakeholder and influencer mapping, this became guidance on messaging, risks, media and spokespeople as the campaigns took shape. For the Global Ocean Observing System, we analysed more than 111,000 mentions across news and social media to map the ocean observation ecosystem and GOOS’s position within it. In Brazil, we designed and ran a nationwide perception survey on people’s connection to the sea, which fed into the development of a global framework survey.
Climate trends and public concern
We track how climate change is discussed and what is driving attention to it, so that UNICEF can decide how to engage its audiences. For UNICEF’s Private Fundraising and Partnerships division, our trends analysis covers market trends impacting climate change, the positioning of businesses and how the issue is discussed across key stakeholders, and it informed UNICEF’s differentiated positioning on climate change. For UNICEF East Asia and Pacific, we track public engagement on topics including climate change, and in early 2025 we identified a regional rise in concern about pollution and recommended actions to protect children’s health.
Global mobilisation for climate action
We design campaigns that turn a complex climate or ocean issue into something people want to take part in. For UN OCHA, we designed #TheHumanRace ahead of World Humanitarian Day and COP26, inviting people to donate 100 minutes of physical activity to symbolically match the 100 billion dollars pledged for climate action, and more than 622,000 people from 183 countries took part. For UNESCO and NautilusThink, we helped shape the artist and creator engagement behind Ocean in Concert at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice, so that storytelling for mass audiences stayed true to the science.