Climate Disinformation Is Already Harming Europeans. Policymakers Should Protect Us.
Across Europe, climate disinformation is pushed through mainstream media and online platforms, accumulating visibility through repetition and amplification.
Is it being amplified by design? Yes.
What has solidified across Europe is not a series of isolated incidents, but the industrialisation of climate disinformation – and a widening gap between the scale of the threat and the regulatory response.
In August 2025, climate was the most targeted topic by online disinformation campaigns across the EU according to EDMO (EDMO, 2025).
In several European countries, centre-right outlets misrepresent the practical realities of the transition now that it’s happening.
Headlines in publications such as Il Giornale (Italy), The Telegraph (UK), or Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Germany) have falsely linked renewables to blackouts, rising bills, or industrial decline, claims that contradict available evidence but nonetheless shape public perception.
In France, monitoring has identified 665 misleading climate claims in mainstream broadcast media within a single year (QuotaClimat, 2025) – most of them linked to energy policy.
Enforcement, however, has been limited.
On CNews, the economist Philippe Herlin described anthropogenic climate change as “a lie” and “a scam.” The €20,000 fine that followed marked a first in Europe – and remains an exception.
In the United Kingdom, the regulator Ofcom has faced similar limits. More than 1,000 climate-related complaints have been dismissed since 2020. While some decisions have recently been revisited, GB News has continued to test the boundaries, airing more than four anti-climate claims per day ahead of the 2024 general election (The Guardian, DeSmog, 2026).
Across borders, the pattern is consistent: visibility without accountability.
According to NATO, the Kremlin has become a key driver of anti-renewable narratives, intensifying efforts since the invasion of Ukraine. By delaying Europe’s transition, such campaigns preserve geopolitical leverage tied to fossil fuels. (NATO, 2024). The cumulative effect is to disrupt the conditions on which Europe’s industrial strategy depends.
Distorted public debate translates into delays, local opposition and rising risk for clean energy investment. At a time when the EU is advancing initiatives such as the Clean Industrial Deal, misleading narratives are spread to undermine our own strategic objectives. This matters not only for policy. It matters for security.
When public understanding of risk is systematically distorted, the capacity to respond collectively is weakened. This becomes particularly visible in moments of crisis.
During the Valencia floods in October 2024, false claims about the causes and scale of the disaster, from conspiracy theories about weather manipulation to fabricated infrastructure failures, reached tens of millions of views online (Maldita, 2025).
Accurate information did not disappear, but it no longer held clear priority.
Climate disinformation does not need to convince everyone to be effective. It only needs to create enough confusion, at the wrong moment, to interfere with decisions. The way we define a problem shapes the response.
In Europe, climate disinformation is too often naively considered legitimate debate. It is not.
Climate disinformation is not dissent. It is the dissemination and amplification of verifiably misleading information that produces real-world harm, by distorting debate, weakening trust, or interfering with crisis response.
The European Union has equipped itself with a set of instruments – the Digital Services Act, the European Media Freedom Act, and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive – but they remain unevenly applied.
Definitions are unclear, enforcement fragmented, and obligations insufficiently precise.
The result is a structural mismatch: a borderless, algorithmic information environment shaped by platform dynamics and media production systems, yet governed by largely national and reactive regulatory frameworks.
The issue is about maintaining the conditions under which public information remains reliable enough to support collective action particularly in moments where timing and trust are critical.
A workable approach is within reach: limiting the algorithmic amplification of demonstrably misleading content and promoting evidence-based scrutiny and contextualisation in media reporting and . This shifts the burden from citizens to those who shape the information space.
The debate is no longer whether action is justified, but whether Europe is willing to respond proportionately to the harms of climate disinformation.
Signed
Organisations
- ClientEarth
- Reliable Media
- NIKII
- KlimaKultuur
- Global Witness
- World Association for Christian Communication (WACC)
- Belgian Climate Centre
- InfluenceMap
Individuals
- Pallavi Sethi, Policy Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science
- Clément Maertens, PhD researcher on Digital Governance Université Namur
- Sébastien Coulaud-Margaritis, Communications Manager, Belgian Climate Centre
- Faye Holder, Director of Policy Engagement, InfluenceMap
- Inge Jonckheere, IPCC Lead Author, ESA
- Niels Souverijns, Climate scientist, VITO
- Els Vrindts, Federal Council of Sustainable Development (Belgium)
- Takumi Therville, PhD candidate, University of Antwerp
- Emmeline Van den Bosch, Communications Manager, Earth and Life Institute – UCLouvain
- Jozefien Schoofs, PhD, KU Leuven
