We can hardly believe it’s almost the end of October! As we outlined in our first release of data, we are going to start producing regular releases of content from now until the end of the year. The goal of these next few months is to build a representative corpus of how different geographies are responding to the energy transition. You can read about our inclusion criteria here.
What Does Climate Information Integrity Look Like?
This current batch is focused on climate communications and information integrity. The majority of this content is an indexing of organizations in the CAAD Coalition and related civil society organizations, think tanks, and research centers publishing on climate communication.
The CAAD Coalition is a network of civil society organizations publishing research and mapping out threats to information integrity on climate change. The coalition has been an important influence on the project: efforts like the Climate Social Science Network’s recent book on Climate Obstruction highlighted how civil society research on climate delay, especially outside Europe and North America, was heavily underrepresented in scholarly research ([cssn-000043]). Moreover, in the lead-up to COP30 in Belém, reports on marketing and lobbying in Brazil by global fossil fuel majors highlighted how invisible climate delay and disinformation communications have been outside of Europe and North America ([caad-000025]).
The new collection answers questions on a number of key climate communication topics:
- How are extreme weather events connected with climate communications?: Research on extreme weather events and attribution, such as this CAAD report on blackouts in Spain highlights how these events become a common moment for disinformation and conspiracy theories to circulate (caad-000055).
- How has climate disinformation changed? While outright climate denial has been on the decline in recent years, doubt and delay rhetoric has become the new dominant theme in climate disinformation.
- What do different public’s think about climate change?Surveys from major polling and research centers available here.
- How should journalist and other talk about climate change? Nearly 100 guides detailing best practices for communicating about climate change.
Below, you can see a list of the CAAD Coalition members and other climate communications organizations we indexed. While we included most members, we excluded a handful of organizations whose websites consist largely of news or original reporting (such as DeSmog) or database platforms better accessed as raw datasets (such as InfluenceMap).
Try Our Public API!
Alongside the release of the CAAD Coalition documents, we are launching our API and MCP server. You can find the documentation here.
One of our goals with the directory is to make search and discovery of civil society research accessible wherever folks need it. Increasingly, workplaces and research institutions are adopting AI tools for synthesis and discovery, so we decided to offer the API as an MCP server as well.
Included in the API are the same records and search index that are on the public website. We are currently testing the API—if you would like additional features or encounter any issues, please email us at [email protected].
What’s Next?
In the coming weeks, we will return to the Energy Transition in Africa with a batch covering nearly 100 organizations. Afterwards, we will release another batch focused on the energy transition in Latin America.
We are also going to write some information integrity-themed “In Focus” pages for COP to share as part of the CAAD newsletter; if you want to hear about our work then, you should sign up!