A Year’s Journey at Climate Fact Checks. 

The Climate Fact Checks (CFC) team recently completed the first year since its establishment, having officially kicked off on 1^st June 2022. The combined team from India and Sri Lanka achieved several major milestones within this short period of time and aims to achieve even bigger goals in educating the masses about the impacts of climate change and the importance of timely climate action. 

With our mission in mind, we strived to bring attention to “Facts” rather than “Fiction” in the Climate Change media narrative. This article is dedicated to recognizing the many achievements of Climate Fact Checks over the past 12 months. 

We noticed a lack of climate change coverage in mainstream media and regional media (Specific to India and Sri Lanka). And even when some topics related to climate change were discussed in the mainstream and especially on social media, we identified that there were some glaring errors and gaps in reporting. As a result, the idea of ‘Climate Fact Checks’ arose to fill these gaps in reporting Climate Change related information and to raise public awareness of the importance of this timely topic.

Hence, to address these goals, the Climate Fact Checks (CFC) team was formed under the able guidance of Fact Crescendo, an IFCN-verified fact-checking organisation operating in India, Sri Lanka, and several other countries in the APAC, consisting of an experienced and dedicated fact-checking team. As the in-house expert, Dr Partha Jyoti Das of the Water and Climate Hazard Division of Aaranyak teamed up with CFC since the project’s inception.

How does CFC work?

Our team operates as an independent, unbiased digital platform that primarily focuses on debunking misinformation and disinformation regarding climate change, being propagated via any form of media or as a social narration. The team comprises dedicated environmental journalists trained in fact-checking and committed to monitoring various media platforms to detect such false and misleading information related to climate change. 

Once we identify such potential misinformation, in-depth research is carried out on topics related to the subject, and experts are also consulted in the relevant focus areas to get better clarity on the topic. We also had the continuous help of our in-house expert from Aaranyak, India, Dr. Das, throughout the first year of operations, and Prof. Hemanthi Ranasignhe from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka, will function as the in-house expert for our new term.  

Afterwards, the findings are presented in English in a simple, easy-to-understand article format on the climatefactchecks.org website. The type of articles can be broadly classified into fact checks, explainers and features, and the team gives special emphasis to trending discussions related to climate change.

These articles later get translated into various local languages depending on their relevance and importance to different communities in India & Sri Lanka. These local languages include Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Sinhala and Tamil.

Our Analysis of Climate Change Misinformation

By the end of the year, CFC had published 536 articles. Among these articles were 103 Fact Checks, 80 Explainers, 80 Feature articles, and 293 translations in all languages. Based on the analysis we conducted at the end of our first term, we categorized our Fact Checks on the type of misinformation they were based on. 

Our team kept their eyes peeled for Climate Change misinformation published on various platforms, including WhatsApp messages, Website articles, Facebook/Instagram posts and videos, Tweets and several YouTube and TikTok videos. Accordingly, we based most of our Fact Checks on Text containing misinformation which came up to 50.5%, 17.5% were on Articles, 11.7% on videos, and 8.7% on images, while the rest were myths about climate change which were popular in the regions mainly in Sri Lanka and India. Moreover, when we categorised the authors of the claims based on their backgrounds of expertise, we discovered that most of them had no scientific qualifications to make such inferences. 

Author Categories 

Moreover, we discovered that 49.5% of the content we fact-checked was false; some of this false content included claims like “We produce 25% more food than we need, and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter” and “Despite all the emissions, we are experiencing global cooling and not global warming.” 23.3% of the claims we found were misleading, 14.6% were half-truths, and 3.9% had missing context, which misguided the readers. 

Looking into the origin of these misinformed claims, the United States of America was on top at 28.2%; India and Sri Lanka closely followed since CFC mainly focused on regional misinformation. Several claims were also made in the European region. 

When the general public comes across misinformation on Climate Change, each individual will react differently. However, this reaction depends on how these claims target vulnerable audiences. Our Analysis showed us that 39.8% of these claims were instilling skepticism about climate change, 26.2% of the articles caused denial, and 15.5% opposed the real facts leaving the readers confused. 

Moreover, when investigating the intentions behind publishing these claims, we found out that 26.2% were misinformed opinions, 21.4% were misinterpreted, 19.4% were misrepresented data, 15.5% were fake data, and 10.7% were cherry-picking against climate change. Among the Fact Checks, 79 were published targeting the general public, 28 were targeting governments, 24 were targeting scientists, and 11 articles were directed towards activists. 

The detrimental impacts of such misinformation recorded from our Fact Checks were a rejection of climate change which counted for 33% of our articles, the public’s disbelief in scientists, which was 29.1%, resentment towards activists, which was 13.6% which mainly came from the misinformation targeting them and 9.7% articles showed a tendency to encourage anti-climate behavior.

However, among these impacts, 14.6% of the articles suggested that the misinformation promoted positive behaviors among the public. It was also interesting to discover that 95% of the misinformation that CFC detected, was ignored by the media, which suggested the importance of our work. 

The other articles, which are Explainers, and Features, were mainly under the themes, Environmental issues, Climate Change Mitigation, Policies, Innovations and analysis. The percentages are mentioned in the chart. 

Different projects at CFC

While the primary focus of CFC has been to address misinformation in the fields related to climate change in the form of articles, the team has ventured into various other projects as well, since we at CFC believe that articles alone cannot help us reach the widest audience. 

Hence, we have started a number of projects to create awareness. Among them are the monthly webinar series, media literacy programs which include climate change misinformation workshops for youth, Climate Change Education program for school students, and organising and participating in climate change-related events with video coverage. 

CFC Climate Buddy is at your fingertips.

We launched climate buddy, a CFC chatbot to allow our readers and audience to reach out to us easily with one click. This platform is available on WhatsApp, where people can reach out to us when they encounter doubtful information about climate change online or in general. This facility is available in multiple languages representing the region and allows the user to send in a text message, screenshot, image or video. This also has a link allowing the user to subscribe to our monthly newsletter.  

Monthly Webinars and Discussions. 

We initiated our monthly webinars in March this year with the intention of creating a dialog between the keen general public and experts from different fields. To date we have conducted 4 webinars on recycling and plastic pollution by Hasanka Padukka, Climate Activism on Earth Day by Melani Gunathilake, How Climate Change impacts migratory birds by Hemantha Seneviratne from Sri Lanka and a webinar on Animations for Science communication and Climate Change Education by Agota Vegso in Hungary. We will continue this webinar series on pressing issues and trending topics, to engage the public and inform them. 

Awareness for Youth and School Students. 

In addition to debunking misinformation on climate change we also discovered there is a lack of awareness among the general public regarding the topic. Hence, we embarked on two awareness programs targeting the youth and children in Sri Lanka. One program is a workshop on media literacy and climate change misinformation for the University students and Youth groups of Sri Lanka. We have completed the session for the undergraduates from the University of Kelaniya and KIU campus and received great commendation from the participants. In addition we just initiated our schools program on Climate Change Education and completed our first session for the students at Hillwood College Kandy. Both sessions were very interactive with fun activities, discussions and presentations. 

Climate Change related events. 

The CFC team organized several events in commemoration of special Environmental days. Among these are plantation drive and clean up drive. For the World Wildlife day we conducted a tree planting program with the Udupila Maha Vidyalaya, and for World Clean Rivers Day a River Clean up at the Mahaweli river in Polgolla, Sri Lanka. In addition, the CFC team published 5 research abstracts at the International Conference on Climate Change, held in Sri Lanka. These abstracts were written based on our team’s research to debunk misinformation. 

Documentaries. 

Video documentaries are also something the CFC team paid close attention to, as it reaches a wider audience online. The CFC team has covered events, interviewed experts on trending topics and conducted investigative documentaries on climate change-related topics. You can view these documentaries on our YouTube Channel. 

In Conclusion…

By completing a year’s work, we are very grateful for our team members who have put in their level best to deliver towards the progress of Climate Fact Checks. Moreover, we are very grateful to our ardent readers and audience for their continuous support and feedback. You can look forward to some new initiatives in the future and keep following Climate Fact Checks.