Picture a coastal community listening for an official evacuation order as a storm bears down. Some residents pack and leave; others hesitate, because a voice on social media is telling them the warning is exaggerated or part of a political scheme. In that moment, information is not a nice-to-have—it is as essential as seawalls and shelters. The United Nations Development Programme is now making this point in stark terms. In its 2026 report, Frontiers of Information Integrity in Climate Change and Climate-Related Disasters, produced through UNDP’s Governance, Rule of Law and Peacebuilding Hub and its Digital, AI and Innovation Hub, the agency warns that misinformation and disinformation have become serious development risks, not merely annoying features of online life. These false narratives can weaken climate policy, slow down clean-energy transitions and undermine disaster response when people need reliable guidance most. To understand the scale and direction of the problem, the report maps 431 information-integrity interventions around the world. Among these, 49 specifically address climate change and climate-related disasters: 31 focus solely on climate, 5 concentrate on disasters, and 13 sit at the intersection of both. The overall picture is sobering. Despite growing awareness of the damage false information can cause, the field remains fragmented, underfunded in key areas and too reactive. Behind each statistic are communities that must decide whom to trust during floods, heatwaves and energy transitions, often with limited access to independent, verified information.
The report makes clear that the nature of the challenge is changing. In the past, climate misinformation often meant denying that climate change was happening at all. Now it goes further. New narratives question whether renewable energy systems actually work, whether net-zero transitions are affordable, and whether climate policies impose unbearable economic costs on ordinary people. The report describes this as “new denial,” and it is arguably more difficult for governments to address than old-fashioned climate skepticism. Misleading narratives can present clean-energy projects as economically damaging, ineffective or politically motivated, even when available evidence strongly supports them. As a result, policymakers face a complicated environment: reforms involving energy grids, public transport, building standards and net-zero timelines become harder to explain and defend. People may begin to view necessary climate action as a burden or a conspiracy rather than a shared investment in the future. During climate-related disasters, the consequences become far more dangerous. False rumours can disrupt early-warning systems, overload emergency services and drown out official communication. A community that has been primed to distrust authorities may ignore an evacuation order; a family that receives a doctored video claiming that aid is fake may avoid seeking help. The risks are especially severe for Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States, where climate exposure is often extreme and information ecosystems have limited resources and capacity. For these reasons, governments should begin treating reliable information as part of climate and disaster infrastructure itself. Building an early-warning system is not enough if communities distrust its warnings or if misleading information spreads faster than official alerts can be delivered.
The report’s numbers expose a major weakness in the current response. Among the climate-related interventions mapped, 21 address prevention, 44 cover detection and monitoring, 45 focus on response, and only 16 concentrate on recovery. Just one intervention integrates all four stages in a single, coherent programme. This distribution reveals an uncomfortable truth: most of the current effort starts after misleading information has already emerged. Fact-checking, monitoring and rapid correction are essential tools, and they should not be abandoned. But they cannot, on their own, repair the trust that repeated exposure to misinformation destroys. By the time a false claim is debunked, it may have been viewed by thousands of people, shared across networks and absorbed into local political conversations. Trust is not restored by a correction alone; it is built over time through consistent, credible communication and through relationships with institutions that have proven they care about people’s safety. The report therefore urges governments and development partners to invest much more heavily in prevention: media literacy programmes, public education, community dialogue and “pre-bunking,” a technique that helps people recognize manipulative messages before they encounter them. Recovery also deserves far greater financing. Even after a particular falsehood disappears, the damage lingers. Repeated misinformation can weaken public confidence in scientists, journalists, governments and public institutions for years, making the next emergency even harder to manage. International development institutions should integrate information integrity into climate adaptation programmes, disaster-risk-reduction projects and governance reforms, rather than treating it as a separate issue financed through short-term communication campaigns that end before long-term trust can be established.
The report also reveals a troubling digital-physical gap. Almost all of the mapped interventions incorporate digital or online approaches, while only around one-quarter use offline or in-person strategies, and very few rely primarily on community-based methods. Around two-thirds of the interventions use multiple communication channels, which is encouraging, but the overall orientation remains heavily online. This creates real problems for the populations climate action most needs to reach. Online monitoring and fact-checking can work well for connected, urban, literate populations, but they often struggle to reach rural communities, older residents, people without smartphones or stable internet, and those who depend on local radio, schools, community leaders and face-to-face communication. Development partners must therefore combine technology investments with locally trusted communication networks. This is especially important across the Global South, where national and subnational interventions are more common and where climate vulnerability often intersects with limited connectivity and institutional capacity. A text alert means nothing to someone who has no phone; a Facebook post is irrelevant to someone who gets news from a mosque, a church, a market or a village elder. There is also a geographic policy gap. More than half of the mapped climate interventions operate at a global level, but regional initiatives remain comparatively limited. Stronger regional networks could help countries share multilingual monitoring tools, research findings and successful responses while adapting global standards to their own national circumstances. Without such networks, countries are left to solve the same problems alone, and the most vulnerable remain the least protected.
Private companies, the report argues, have both opportunities and responsibilities in this emerging landscape. Technology firms can develop AI-powered monitoring systems, verification platforms, content-authentication technologies and multilingual tools that help journalists and fact-checkers do their work more effectively. Yet social-media platforms are not neutral vehicles; their algorithms influence how information is amplified, monetized and spread. The report finds that these platforms are insufficiently involved in many multi-stakeholder initiatives, despite being central to the information ecosystem. Artificial intelligence makes the situation more urgent. On the one hand, AI can analyse vast amounts of content, detect emerging narratives and provide early warnings about coordinated disinformation campaigns. On the other hand, generative AI can produce realistic synthetic content and personalized misinformation at enormous scale, outpacing human fact-checkers and even sophisticated verification systems. Engagement-driven algorithms may further amplify sensational, emotional or polarizing climate narratives, rewarding outrage over accuracy. The good news is that UNDP identifies five structural gaps that can be addressed: limited platform participation, weak recovery efforts, insufficient regional coordination, dependence on short-term funding, and the digital-physical divide. It also points toward four partnership models that offer a path forward. National Action Coalitions bring together governments, researchers, media outlets and civil society organizations to coordinate responses within countries. Digital-physical partnerships link technology providers with grassroots organizations that have deep local trust. Public-private accountability arrangements involve platforms and advertisers in setting standards and consequences. Global-local partnerships help successful national programmes scale internationally while remaining sensitive to local cultures and languages.
Taken together, the report’s message is straightforward: information integrity must be treated as part of climate resilience, not merely as a media problem. Governments can invest heavily in renewable energy, adaptation infrastructure and early-warning systems, but those investments can lose much of their effectiveness when citizens distrust scientific evidence, dismiss credible warnings or believe that climate action is a hoax. A solar farm that is opposed by a misleading campaign may be delayed for years; a flood warning that is ridiculed online may cost lives. The report suggests that sustainable financing, stronger prevention, community engagement, regional cooperation and responsible technology governance will determine not only who wins the information battle, but how effectively countries deliver climate action and protect the most vulnerable communities. In the end, this is about human dignity. People have a right to accurate information when they are deciding whether to evacuate, whether to support a clean-energy project, or whether to prepare for the next disaster. The struggle against climate change is also a struggle for trust—trust in science, trust in public institutions and trust in one another. If that trust is undermined, every other investment in resilience becomes more fragile. If it is protected and strengthened, communities can face a changing climate with confidence, clarity and the shared belief that they are not alone in the storm.