In a climate of misinformation, access to communication is a matter of climate justice.
On the eve of COP30, media framing and its narratives promote sacrifice zones in the climate agenda
The Amazon has always burned. It has burned in flames, in silence and in words. Now, on the eve of COP30, the climate conference that will bring leaders from various countries to Belém, it is also burning in the field of narratives. For a long time, the climate debate has ceased to be merely a scientific confrontation and has become a political and symbolic dispute over discourse.
And it is in this muddy ground of public communication that some of the most decisive battles of the 21st century are being fought: the battle over narratives.
As the planet breaks successive temperature records, Brazil attempts to position itself as a green power. In this context, COP30 is being announced as the “COP of implementation”, the event expected to confirm concrete commitments to emissions reductions and forest protection. This hope is anchored in Brazil’s leadership when, as host of the 1992 Earth Summit, it pushed forward significant advances in the climate agenda.
However, there is a chasm between international agreements and the everyday perception of the Brazilian population. A 2024 study by the Instituto Ideia in partnership with LaClima revealed that 71% of people in the country do not know what COP is, and 34% are unaware of the concept of climate change. In the age of social media, this information gap becomes the perfect fuel for disinformation, a smoke that obscures, distorts and manipulates the environmental debate.
Fake news about the climate and the Amazon is developed with surgical precision. Projects such as Amazônia Livre de Fake [Amazon Free of Fakes], coordinated by Intervozes-Coletivo Brasil de Comunicação Social, show that this disinformation is not spontaneous noise, but an articulated system. Its primary agents orbit political and economic interests tied to deforestation, predatory agribusiness and illegal mining.
These agents disseminate content that denies the climate crisis, downplays deforestation, discredits scientists and accuses socio-environmental organisations of “hindering progress.” There is also a warped narrative of sovereignty: they claim that protecting the forest is “giving in to international pressure,” as if the Amazon were hostage to a foreign conspiracy. These messages circulate through WhatsApp groups, co-opted community radio stations, regional influencers and members of the so-called “chainsaw bloc”, who turn anti-environmental rhetoric into a political banner.
At the same time, the terms “clean energy” and “energy transition” circulate like mantras in official and corporate speeches, but do not always carry the emancipatory meaning they seem to suggest. The climate agenda bets on and invests in mega solar and wind projects as the path toward a green future, while large corporations use sustainability labels as marketing showcases.
However, in many cases, these ventures reproduce old power structures: they concentrate profits, ignore local communities and trigger new socio-environmental and land conflicts. Yet in the voices of the forest peoples, Ribeirinho and Quilombola communities and grassroots communicators, “clean energy” takes on another meaning.
It becomes a symbol of autonomy and dignity, since community solar energy, sustainable biogas and small microgeneration plants can give communities control over their own energy lives. This semantic dispute over what “clean” means reveals how the energy transition can either liberate or subjugate, depending on who is telling the story and who is deciding.
This is where Intervozes becomes essential, by conducting research on narratives that silence the voices of ethnic groups who are affected by climate change and marginalised in the agenda that debates solutions. Its work goes beyond research and reporting on issues that harm the rights of the Brazilian population: it proposes a pedagogy of communication that links technology, territory and human rights.
In the Amazônia Livre de Fake project, the collective combines digital monitoring, community mobilisation and civic education. The first front tracks posts, hashtags and disinformation networks in order to understand patterns and strategies; the second organises workshops and discussion groups in Amazonian territories, discussing climate and rights with those who rarely have access to high-quality information; and the third promotes media literacy, training young people and local leaders to identify reliable sources and dismantle misleading narratives.
These actions add to a broader investigative effort that the collective has been developing for years: the Vozes Silenciadas [Silenced Voices] series. The Vozes Silenciadas: Energias Renováveis [Silenced Voices: Renewable Energy] research conducted in 2024 delves into contradictions in media coverage of the energy transition in Brazil and shows how corporate and government agendas dominate community voices. The study reveals that in more than 70% of analysed stories, the main sources are companies in the sector and state authorities, while populations affected by wind, solar and hydroelectric projects rarely make an appearance.
The report denounces a structural erasure: the media and state talk about clean energy, but silence those who live the real consequences of this transition. Moreover, such a narrative camouflages interests and reproduces old racist practices, as highlighted by Alfredo Portugal and Nataly Queiroz Lima in the article “Discurso e prática ‘salvacionistas’ sobre energias limpas reforçam racismo Ambiental” [“Salvationist” discourse and practices around clean energies reinforce environmental racism.]
In this same line of research, in 2020 Intervozes had already published Vozes Silenciadas: A cobertura do vazamento de petróleo na costa brasileira [Silenced Voices: Coverage of the oil spill on the Brazilian coast]. This was a landmark study that examined how mainstream media covered one of the largest environmental crimes in Brazil, which occurred in 2019 – called a crime here, because disasters result from extreme natural events. The study showed that the episode, which affected over a thousand beaches and devastated the livelihood of fishing communities in the Northeast, was narrated by the press in a superficial, fragmented and decontextualised way, prioritising the technical perspective of the authorities and erasing the collective actors who were directly affected.
The study also revealed how the framing of the environmental discourse in Brazilian media tends to centralise institutions and marginalise popular experience, creating an imaginary in which the people appear only as victims, never as political agents.
By bringing together the two publications in the Vozes Silenciadas: Petróleo and Energias Renováveis [Silenced Voices: Oil and Renewable Energy] series, Intervozes builds a coherent line of reflection on how traditional media reproduces inequalities of voice in the environmental debate. In both cases, the critique lies in showing that the problem is not only what is said, but what is not said.
The absence of collective and racialised subjects – fisherfolk, Ribeirinho and Quilombola communities and Indigenous peoples – in journalistic narratives about the environment and energy reveals a democratic deficit in the Brazilian public sphere. This institutional silence is in itself a form of disinformation, a narrative, a stance on who has access to the benefits of these adaptation and mitigation processes and who pays the price of climate adaptation and mitigation implementation.
By connecting Vozes Silenciadas and Amazônia Livre de Fake, Intervozes sketches a map of information power in the climate field. On one side, deliberate disinformation is shown to create confusion and fear; on the other, the structural silencing of Amazonian and popular voices is seen to reinforce symbolic inequality and perpetuate an exclusionary model of energy transition. This combination of empirical research and pedagogic action shows that the right to communication is the foundation of all environmental transformation, because the climate crisis is, above all, a crisis of listening.
Confronting disinformation, when rooted in the territory, can generate real social impact in an environment of narrative dispute that still does not recognise the right to communication and information as a guiding axis of climate policy.
Research on these processes requires methodologies that include participant observation, communication ethnography and discourse analysis as tools to understand not only what is said, but how, by whom, and with what intention. Interviews with grassroots communicators and environmental organisations can reveal how power, language and the climate agenda are interwoven. This active listening, combined with a critical analysis of digital data, helps identify the flows of disinformation and the openings through which it can be transformed into collective awareness.
It is hoped that this reflection, anchored in the Amazônia Livre de Fake initiative and the findings of the Vozes Silenciadas: Energias Renováveis and Vozes Silenciadas: A cobertura do vazamento de petróleo na costa brasileira research, can help combat disinformation and strengthen a culture of public communication committed to climate justice. Because, in this landscape, other questions must be asked: How are disinformation narratives structured in the Amazon? What impact do they have on public perception and on local climate policies? And above all, what communication legacy will COP30 be able to leave for Brazil and the world?
I dare suggest that the answers to these questions require recognition that there will be no sustainable future without the democratisation of communication. COP30 must be remembered as a historic milestone, with a need for it to go beyond diplomatic commitments and become a space of listening: listening to peoples, movements, communicators and scientists; recognising that communication is also a form of climate mitigation action.
In the end, what is at stake is more than climate stability: it is the right to access an adaptation and mitigation process that considers the specific realities of the diverse peoples who inhabit Brazil and the planet, as well as the right to narrate one’s own story.
The Amazon, which has for centuries been narrated as a territory of exploitation, now demands its place as a territory of enunciation, because its peoples are ready to be heard. Ultimately, works like those of Intervozes reveal that fighting disinformation is a form of environmental justice, a struggle for information amid the smoke that shields the concentration of narratives, wealth and privilege.
Maryellen Crisóstomo is a Quilombola woman, a journalist associated with Intervozes, and a law student.
This article was originally published in intervozes.org.br.