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Keeping Safe from Fires and Liars
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Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:11:49 +0000
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This is a guest blog by Tom Ellison, Deputy Director, Center for Climate and Security (CCS), a research institute tackling...
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This is a guest blog by Tom Ellison, Deputy Director, Center for Climate and Security (CCS), a research institute tackling systemic climate and ecological security risks, and Phil Newell, Communications co-chair, Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a global coalition of over 50 leading climate and anti-disinformation organizations dealing with climate misinformation and disinformation.
This past summer’s extreme weather has brought home the intensity of the climate crisis for many of us around the world: from the catastrophic floods in Nepal, to the lethal heatwaves across Europe and India, to the choking wildfires in North America, France, and Spain.
As if that isn’t enough, we are seeing these extreme weather crises going hand-in-hand with information crises. The danger of heatwaves is being downplayed. Flooding is getting blamed on foreign neighbors. Wildfires are being attributed to a land-clearing conspiracy. As fossil-fueled extreme weather continues, it is also fueling an information crisis, bringing climate denial, AI slop content, political propaganda, extremism, and online rage bait. This has ramifications that endanger lives, divide societies, and undermine climate action.
We must protect ourselves and those around us not only from the physical impacts of extreme weather but also from the disinformation that comes with it. The good news is, we can keep ourselves safe by anticipating and short-circuiting lies and distortions. A new toolkit ‘Weathering Extremes,’ by Jennie King from CCS lays out some practical steps forward:
A Spanish military unit battles wildfires in August 2026, which displaced more than 300,000 people across Spain and France. (Military Emergencies Unit, Spanish Ministry of Defense)
Understanding the Threat
Wildfires, floods, and other extreme events bring a host of problematic claims and narratives. Experts sometimes talk about false information that is spread knowingly (disinformation), or false information spread unknowingly (misinformation), or even cherry-picked facts that are spread to manipulate (malinformation). But the most important thing is the impact this kind of information has, not the mindset of the person clicking “share.”
In the wild, we might encounter three main categories of deception around extreme weather. These can look different from traditional denialism in climate debates. But they have a variety of harmful impacts.
The first category is environmental, which attacks science or cherry picks facts to separate a disaster from its climate-related causes. To use wildfires as an example, this could mean saying this wildfire was started by an arsonist, not climate change. That may be true, but it obscures the fact that climate change is making wildfires more likely and intense, regardless of how they start. Over time, this can weaken our understanding of climate change, and slow down climate action.
The second category is political, which attacks disaster response efforts, often to grind an unrelated partisan or geopolitical axe. For example, Russia falsely claimed the wildfire wouldn’t have been so bad if the US hadn’t wasted resources supporting Ukraine, or the US President misleadingly argued that the LA wildfires are the fault of his political rival’s water policies. These claims can polarize governance, undermine disaster relief or recovery, or empower authoritarian leaders.
The third category is hateful and extremist, which blames disasters on minorities or promotes conspiracy theories. These deceptions might look like the wildfires were caused by Jewish weather control or that foreigners are stealing all the disaster aid. Such falsehoods can divide societies or endanger the safety of vulnerable people.
The Perpetrators and Motives
These claims are mostly about directing blame, whether to “natural” causes, to conspiracies, to minorities, to political rivals or foreign enemies–basically, anything but climate change. So what is really behind the lies? It comes down to money and power that vested interests have on the line during chaotic, viral climate disasters.
Big Oil & Big Tech
Private interests have a great deal of money to protect or gain from high-profile extreme weather events. Most obviously, oil, gas, coal, animal agriculture, and other polluting sectors don’t want disasters to motivate climate action that threatens their profits. The role of corporate lobbying, advertising, and PR in climate disinformation and on climate obstruction, i.e. creating doubt on the severity of the climate crisis has been documented for decades. But more recently, the interests of Big Oil are increasingly aligned with those of Big Tech.
Social Media Algorithms
Once upon a time, social media promised an open shortcut for connecting with other people, be they friends, family, or strangers. But along the way, social media became a stew of addictive algorithms, with users forever scrolling in circles, where attention is sold to advertisers rather than browsing an open web. Now, online conversation around disasters favors whatever earns clicks and cash– whether it’s rumors, rage bait, AI slop, propaganda, or hate speech. As a result, the social media channel for public engagement has been hijacked by dishonest influencers, polluters, and bots. That leaves policymakers and the public struggling to find reliable information during disasters, right when they need it most.
Political Ideology
Besides money, disinformation about extreme weather is also motivated by ideology and politics. Authoritarian governments see extreme weather as a chance to attach their message to a major news event and to undermine opponents and critics. Political extremists, especially the far right, have started treating climate change not just as an energy debate but as an enemy cultural identity. These actors are not the cause of our toxic information environment, but exploit and shape it to serve their goals.
Often, all these motives are mixed. For example, Russia has covertly sponsored far-right climate ‘disinfluencers’ in the United States, and the state-owned gas company owns Russia’s largest media conglomerate, showing how directly fossil fuel interests, social media, and global politics are intertwined.
During Hurricane Helene in 2024, the far right, online provocateurs, and Russian media spread climate denial, partisan attacks, and xenophobic messages, fueling security threats to public officials and FEMA relief workers (FEMA).
What Can We Do?
There are ways we can protect ourselves and our communities from these threats:
We as communities and climate concerned citizens should expect disinformation during extreme weather as the rule, not the exception. Unfortunately, these information crises can happen anywhere, as local events are co-opted into viral narratives. By reading this and the resources here, you are already ahead of the curve.
Second, we need to sidestep the algorithm and not rely only on social media. It’s tempting to focus all our energy online, but social media tends to reward lies and nonsense over truth. As Jennie King writes in Weathering Extremes, “information resilience is built on networks, not newsfeeds.” That means real-world connections matter – personal relationships, ties with local governments, or simple tools like email lists, phone trees, and group texts – that we can build before a disaster strikes. And it’s worth remembering: as Yale’s Climate Maps show, most people in the U.S, for example, support key climate actions – even if you’d never guess that from social media.
Third, we can build defenses ahead of time, rather than scrambling to counter or fact-check every rumor and lie during a crisis. One way is “pre-bunking”– warning people in advance about certain narratives, messengers, or tactics they are likely to run into. In fact, the disinformation examples earlier in this piece are themselves a form of pre-bunking. Another tool is the “truth sandwich” – leading with the truth, then knocking down a false claim or bad source, before reiterating the facts again. We can also work to get accurate information into the data AI chatbots learn and draw from – also called “generative engine optimization”. This is increasingly important as AI use grows, and because cunning governments and companies are already trying to feed their own messages into chatbots.
A resource on prebunking and generative engine optimization, from Weathering Extremes: A Toolkit for Information Resilience Amid Disaster (CCS).
Finally, as citizens and civil society, we can push for the global, systematic reforms needed to make our online environment more trustworthy. Reforms that call for improved safety, transparency, privacy, and accountability standards for tech platforms endorsed by CAAD are a great starting point, and at will unwind some of the toxic incentives that give lies and outrage the upper hand.
Toward Information Resilience
Climate change and disinformation are two of the systemic challenges of our time, and they are colliding in harmful ways. Neither will be solved easily. But more people and institutions globally are tackling the challenge, from the UN to researchers to certain governments. Ultimately, reliable information is just as much a part of necessary climate infrastructure as is solar and wind power or flood defences. And everyone has a part to play from newsrooms to social algorithms and even family group chats.
References and resources:
Weathering Extremes: A Toolkit for Information Resilience Amid Disaster
Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition
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UNGA: A week that laid bare the world’s fault lines, climate crisis all over it
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Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:13:34 +0000
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From war and geopolitical fragmentation to food insecurity, energy security and the accelerating climate crisis, this year’s UN General Assembly felt less like a single summit and more like a whistle-stop tour through the fault lines shaping the world.
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For António Guterres, it was his final UNGA as UN Secretary-General. And he used the moment to make the case, repeatedly and forcefully, for international cooperation at precisely the moment when it is under greatest strain. In his final General Assembly address, Guterres called on governments to adopt national plans to transition away from fossil fuels, aligned with 1.5°C, and to protect workers and communities through that transition. And then, in words that will resonate far beyond the UN chamber, he landed on three words: “Polluters must pay.”
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For us here at 350, that matters. For years, movements around the world have been demanding that those who have profited most from fossil fuels contribute to addressing the damage caused by their pollution. On Monday 21st of September, 350.org along with partners from Greenpeace and Oxfam presented a petition to the UN with over 2 million signatures, calling to make pollluters pay. On Tuesday that demand was articulated from the highest level of the UN.
And it wasn’t Guterres alone. The call for greater accountability from major polluters was echoed by political leaders, including the Spanish minister for ecological transition, Sara Aagesen Muñoz
Perhaps one of the most powerful interventions came from Nepal. Prime Minister Balendra Shah addressed the General Assembly following the devastating Bhotekoshi-Trishuli floods, which killed more than 1,400 people and left thousands unaccounted for, according to Nepalese authorities. He spoke not in abstract terms about climate risk, but about families waiting for loved ones who may never come home; communities searching through mud, rocks and floodwater; and homes, schools, roads and livelihoods swept away.
His message was simple: Nepal heard the warnings. But global political action did not move at the speed required.
“The Bhotekoshi-Trishuli disaster was not just a local tragedy, it was a warning to the world.”
Shah also made the injustice explicit. Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet is facing profound consequences from a warming climate. He called for greater climate finance, including grant-based support rather than repeatedly pushing vulnerable countries further into debt. This is what climate injustice looks like in practice: countries that have contributed least to the crisis are being forced to spend scarce resources responding to its consequences.
THE AWKWARD SILENCE
Scientists, frontline communities and climate movements have been saying for decades that climate breakdown will amplify existing vulnerabilities, undermine livelihoods, drive displacement and interact with conflict and instability. The intelligence assessment adds another powerful voice to that evidence base. But the fundamental problem isn’t a lack of warnings. It is the gap between what governments know and what they are prepared to do.
This brings us to one of the most concerning contradictions at play now: the leaders who will preside over the next stage of the climate negotiations, Australia and Türkiye, both used UNGA and New York Climate Week to talk about energy, electrification and climate action. But they were awfully silent about the elephant in the room: the urgent need to phase-out fossil fuels. It’s not like we’re living the worst energy crisis ever, emphasizing how crucial it is to break our toxic dependency towards oil, coal and gas.
Coal mine in Hunter Valley, Australia. Photo credit: Max Phillips
On the positive side, Türkiye launched its 35-by-35 Global Electrification Pledge, calling for electricity to account for 35% of global final energy consumption by 2035, alongside initiatives covering grids, buildings, transport, industry and AI. Electrification is important. But there is a fundamental question that cannot be avoided: electrifying with what, and for who?
ELECTRIFY NOW, BUT IN THE RIGHT WAY
As 350 and partners argued this week, electrification needs to go hand in hand with rapidly scaling renewables and phasing out coal, oil and gas – and with making climate finance available for developing countries to achieve this. 92+ organizations published this open letter saying that the electrification target counts only if the power is renewable, if it reaches the people who have no electricity today, if the money follows, and if it comes alongside progress in the negotiations on the Just Transition mechanism, finance, and adaptation, and other existing commitments
Otherwise, we risk increasing electricity demand while leaving the fossil-fuel system at the center of the energy system.
That contradiction was particularly visible in the speeches and policies surrounding COP31. Australia is talking about climate action while its government recently approved an expansion of BHP’s Saraji coal mine. Türkiye is promoting electrification while planning further fossil-fuel power capacity. The issue isn’t whether electrification is necessary. It is. The issue is whether governments are prepared to phase out fossil fuels and support a just transition.
AMBITION CANNOT WAIT
Street view of the wildfires in Türkiye’s Antalya province, which will host the COP31 summit. (Photo credit: 350.org Türkiye)
As COP32 hosts, Ethiopia showed its hand with President Atske’s UN address demonstrating the leadership East Africa has been waiting for. Inviting world leaders to Ethiopia in November 2027 in order to find solutions to the climate crisis, one of the defining imperatives of our era.At a time when other world leaders are backsliding on climate action, Ethiopia carried the torch of climate ambition high. As the next host of the Conference of Parties (COP32), this is exactly the kind of ambitious agenda-setting Africa needs, one that prioritizes a people-centered transition away from fossil fuels.
However, with the world on the verge of overshooting 1.5C, every fraction of a degree we can avoid heating matters – and so does every political meeting. The World Bank. The IMF. The UN. The climate finance negotiations. The UN Tax Convention. COP31. Each is another opportunity to close the gap between what governments know and what they do. We cannot wait until COP32 to see the fossil fuels phase out in the agenda. We need it now.
UNGA ends. The diplomats leave New York. The speeches disappear from the headlines. But the crises don’t. The world has experienced devastating wildfires, catastrophic floods, extreme heat and a rapidly intensifying El Niño. The impacts are already being felt by people and communities around the world.
Next week, the climate season moves to Fiji for the COP31 pre-COP. All eyes will increasingly turn towards the negotiations in Türkiye and Australia. The question for COP31 should be straightforward:
Will governments finally put a date on the end of fossil fuels, and put the money behind a just transition?
Because after this week in New York, there is little excuse for pretending we don’t know where the world is heading. We know the risks. We know the solutions. We know who has profited. And, who is paying the price.
Now the question is whether governments are prepared to act. Polluters must pay. And the fossil-fuel era must end.
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The Haze We All Breathe: A Letter from Kalimantan, Indonesia
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Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:44:40 +0000
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This is a first-hand account by Margaretha Winda, a journalist based in Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan, on Indonesia’s wildfires, which...
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This is a first-hand account by Margaretha Winda, a journalist based in Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan, on Indonesia’s wildfires, which has produced hazardous smoke that chokes its people and wildlife, and has spread to neighbouring countries Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and the Philippines.
There is something ironic about forest and land fires. A blaze may start on a single plot of land. But the resulting smoke and haze do not recognize boundaries of ownership. They move past fences, roads, villages. They enter homes, schools, and the lungs of people who never lit a match. Those who never started the fire are the ones who end up paying for it — and that is as true a few kilometers from the fire as it is a few hundred.
What it’s like here
I remember one morning this season waking up to a sky already overcast, the sun reduced to a faint, sickly yellow smear behind the haze. The smell hits before anything else — burning peat, sharp and distinctive, the kind that settles into your chest until it’s hard to take a full breath. And yet life around me didn’t stop: women were still washing clothes at the riverbank with no protection at all, no masks, no thought given to a health check. Children rode their bicycles to school through thick smoke, unmasked, because no notice had come telling schools to close.
This year is worse than anything I remember from three years ago. Back then, fires happened too, but the smoke never got this thick, and it was brought under control quickly. This year’s fires spread everywhere, and the response never caught up.
Where I live, in Pulang Pisau, 1,503 hotspots and 38 fires have burned 334 hectares this season. Jabiren Raya alone accounts for 1,303 hotspots and 257 hectares — including peat near the Tumbang Nusa bridge up to 40 meters deep, among the deepest burning in the regency. It smolders underground and resists rain rather than burning out quickly.
A Forest and Land Fire Control Brigade worker tries to extinguish a fire in Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan province, on Aug 12, 2026. Photo: Reuters/Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana
I am not writing this from a distance. I’m a journalist, and this season my job has put me at the fire sites themselves, working right up against the smoke. The one thing that’s changed for me is that I now have to wear a mask more carefully than ever, just to avoid getting sick myself — though for most people around me, that choice doesn’t even exist. Work doesn’t stop for haze. There is no version of survival here that includes staying home.
It has reached my own family, too. I have two children, and both came down with acute respiratory infections during this haze season that simply wouldn’t clear — coughing, flu, and at one point diarrhea. They were not the only ones. Children and elderly people across my community have ended up in hospital, struggling to breathe.
Other impacts I’ve seen
Nationally, Indonesia’s health ministry recorded nearly 51,000 acute respiratory infection cases tied to the haze in July and August alone. Two volunteers fighting fires in Central Kalimantan died this month from breathing difficulties. An orangutan was found on a plantation in West Kalimantan and later died of suspected smoke inhalation; firefighters elsewhere have found snake and pangolin carcasses in burned areas.
I’ve seen versions of this closer to home too. In Pulang Pisau, in the early morning and evening, visibility here drops to about one meter. The wildlife I’ve seen displaced is mostly snakes, turtles, and monkeys — animals whose habitat simply burned out from under them. A duck farm near one of the fire sites was directly hit as well, its surroundings caught up in the same blaze. On schooling: some areas of Pulang Pisau have shifted to distance learning, but others are still holding regular in-person classes in the middle of all this smoke — there’s no consistent rule, just whatever each school decides on its own.
And the government’s presence has been strangely uneven. Even as fires grew large across the district, official attention stayed narrowly fixed on Desa Tumbang Nusa, while other areas burned with far less response.
Smoke doesn’t stop at the borders
I’ve lived through enough dry seasons here to recognize the warning signs: the sky dimming to a dull yellow-grey before the smoke rolls in for good. The wind carries the smoke north toward Palangka Raya. This year, it even crossed the Java Sea and kept going — and by the first week of September, four other countries were living inside it too.
Singapore. On September 4, residents woke up to a smoggy sky as the air quality index crossed into unhealthy territory. By late afternoon, IQAir’s global rankings placed the city with the third-worst air on the planet.
Malaysia. In Sarawak state, the capital Kuching had already been ranked the world’s most polluted city for over a week straight, with a hazardous reading of 311. On September 4, its Air Pollutant Index in the town of Serian surged past 500 — a level that can halt nonessential work and outdoor activity — prompting Malaysia’s king to consent to a state of emergency there. A Serian resident told reporters, “Even when I turn on the air conditioner, I can still smell the smoke in my house.” Days earlier, the health ministry reported asthma cases up 259% and upper respiratory infections up 124% in a single week.
The Philippines. Officials declared air quality “acutely unhealthy” across Manila’s metro area, the Visayas, and Mindanao — three separate island groups, hundreds of kilometers apart, choking on the same haze. The health department was telling people to mask up..
Brunei. Hazy conditions have blanketed the sultanate since mid-August, with no clear end in sight as the fires behind it keep burning.
The city center blanketed in thick haze in Kuching, Sarawak state, Malaysia, on Sept. 4, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Xpin Voon.
We may live in very different places, but our fears are starting to sound the same. Families in Sarawak are now doing what mine has done all season — watching their children for coughs, keeping them inside, waiting for the air to clear. Those who contributed least to causing this crisis are so often the first, and the hardest, hit by it.
An estimated 10.67 million people are affected by this haze here in Indonesia alone. Citizens have taken this to court before. In 2017, a group of Palangka Raya residents won a citizen lawsuit against the Indonesian government over its failure in handling forest and land fires and in preventing a haze disaster — a court found the state guilty of unlawful negligence, a ruling upheld on appeal and again by the Supreme Court in 2019, only to be dismissed again in a judicial review on 2022. But winning in court hasn’t meant winning in practice: judgments like this one have gone largely unenforced.
So when people elsewhere start watching their children for coughs and keeping them indoors, waiting for the air to clear — I recognize that fear completely. It’s the one my family has lived inside all season, without the world watching.
Why this keeps happening
Landowners are responsible for safeguarding their land. Companies are responsible for ensuring their operations don’t create risk. Government is responsible for making sure all of this is actually enforced — not just showing up once a fire is already large.
And I want to be precise about who is actually burning, because this gets misunderstood constantly, both inside and outside Indonesia. Dayak communities here largely stopped clearing land by fire a long time ago. The fires happening now are not, in my experience, a story about traditional farming practices gone wrong.
Part of why these fires catch and spread so easily goes back decades, to how this land was managed. Much of Kalimantan’s peat has been drained for industrial agriculture, including oil palm, leaving it dry enough to burn like fuel instead of holding the water that once kept it from catching. Indonesian law requires companies operating on peatland to keep it wet, but those rules are widely ignored, and to make it worse the President dismantled the ad hoc government agency that tasked specifically for peat restoration last year, leaving accountability gap that no other institutions seem to prepared to fill.
Burnt peatland in Central Kalimantan province, Indonesia, in August 2026. Photo: Krismes Santo Haloho/Mongabay Indonesia.
What’s also changed is the climate in which we now live. Longer, hotter dry seasons — the kind scientists tie to the broader climate crisis – are setting the stage for fires to start faster and burn longer. Layered on top of this year’s own strong El Niño, fires can now burn underground indried-out peat for months.
The way forward
Communities here already practice gotong royong — mutual cooperation, neighbors carrying each other through hardship. I opened a volunteer relief post in the Kahayan Hilir subdistrict this season to supply logistics to Masyarakat Peduli Api — the volunteer firefighters actually on the ground putting these fires out. A lot of people have stepped up to donate food and drink for them. But those volunteers are still going out without basic equipment — hoses to fight