Security actors around the world are beginning to recognize the risks posed by information manipulation surrounding extreme weather, climate resilience, and the clean energy transition. The overlapping interests in the physical carbon economy and the digital attention economy provide fertile ground for opportunistic extremists and authoritarian states to scapegoat adversaries, undermine democratic legitimacy, and warp policymaking processes.
California is a prime example of where these dynamics will continue to play out as climate change impacts worsen, geopolitics fragments, and information ecosystems are transformed. California plays an outsized economic role both in the United States and globally. The state produces three-quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts, is home to a significant portion of global tech infrastructure and Fortune 500 companies, and ranks number one in the country for tourism spending. California’s GDP would rank fourth globally, just ahead of Japan, if it were an independent nation. California hosts the largest military population of any US state, houses infrastructure for detecting or countering missile attacks on the United States, and would be a critical US staging ground in the event of conflict over Taiwan or North Korea.
It is also highly vulnerable to climate change impacts and extreme weather, most notably wildfires and drought. These economic, environmental, and security factors result in a state that is susceptible to the kind of mis- and disinformation that undermines climate action, sows seeds of social division, endangers citizens during disasters, and undermines national security. These threats can come from a mix of actors and motives, including opportunistic political leaders, foreign actors conducting hybrid warfare, domestic extremists undermining social cohesion, outrage merchants monetizing attention, and well-meaning people caught up in algorithmic echo-chambers.
False or misleading information affects all stages of disaster response, including pre-disaster preparedness, mid-disaster crisis coordination, and post-disaster rebuilding of infrastructure, services, and trust. During the LA wildfires in 2025, a host of misleading narratives spread, including ones promoted by the President, complicating the rapid response efforts. In the aftermath, new false narratives emerged about post-fire state policy measures, including the claim that new state legislation would allow the state to purchase lots in the Palisades for cheap and turn them into dense low-income housing. These examples show that mis- and disinformation are not just concerns to be managed during disasters but throughout all stages of resilience-building efforts.
Following an initial workshop in Florida in 2025, the Center for Climate and Security (CCS), an institute of the Council on Strategic Risks, recently completed the second state-level foresight exercise in California to explore these dynamics with a cross-section of state and local stakeholders. Co-hosted by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, the event brought together a diverse mix of expertise, including local resilience and emergency management, national security and foreign policy, communications and information integrity, social and natural sciences, and civil society organizations. Participants heard from senior climate, information, and security experts, then engaged in a facilitated scenario exercise exploring three divergent future scenarios for California in the coming years.
Key Variables: Tech, Institutions, and Trust
The workshop identified key uncertainties that will shape California’s future at the nexus of extreme weather, information ecosystems, and security through 2030.
Technological Developments
What is the status of generative AI? How does AI impact the job market? Does the growth of AI enable new cybersecurity risks? Do technology companies have safeguards against the proliferation of mis- and disinformation? Is new or better environmental data collected, or do gaps widen? Who has access to this data?
Institutional Capacity
What do federal, state, and local government budgets look like in the future? Are resources available to build long-term resilience, or are jurisdictions in a state of constant crisis response? What sectors will available funds go to? Will there be effective federal-state and state-state collaboration? What are institutions’ capacities to manage decreasing natural resources?
Public Trust
How does the public view government institutions and services? How do leaders model responses to the impacts of climate change? Do they result in blame-casting and radicalization or collaboration?
In addition to potential weather and geopolitical flashpoints, these drivers converge to imply a range of future outcomes involving this nexus of issues.
Divergent Futures
Three diverging, illustrative scenarios underscored the range of uncertainties and challenges at the intersection of climate, information, and security in California.
Continuity: Muddling Through Crisis
In this group, participants imagined a scenario where a major wildfire occurred during a high-profile event in the state, such as the Olympics. This type of extreme event could overwhelm local capacity and create the opening for a blackout or water shortage. The cascading crisis, with many resources focused on the Olympics, could lead to a shortage of emergency housing for displaced people, breakdowns in transportation infrastructure, rumors about the cause of the crisis, and diplomatic friction over safeguarding international Olympic delegations. Response systems like joint communications and interagency coordination could be slowed, but in the vacuum, nontraditional actors like the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Olympic volunteers might emerge as trusted communicators. Many normal people’s lives would continue mostly uninterrupted, but the incident would produce uncertainty about recovery and mistrust of government institutions.
Collapse: A Geopolitical Trigger
Participants imagining the collapse scenario characterized it as a combination of cascading shocks beginning with a major geopolitical event, such as a military confrontation over Taiwan. This escalation of tensions in the Pacific could motivate non-attributable hybrid warfare in California, such as cyber attacks or arson, which, combined with wildfires and drought, could lead to rampant speculation and mis- or disinformation about the cause of the crisis. If occurring between August and November, such a series of events could affect voting or the state/federal budget process. Domestic strains, diversion of resources for military purposes in the Pacific, or legislative dysfunction could turn social services offline, weakening public trust in institutions. Internal conflict hotspots could grow more likely across the state. This signifies a future in which the everyday life of Californians, and broader US interests and institutions, are greatly disrupted.
Transformation: Social Tipping Points
In contrast to the collapse scenario, participants in this group explored a future in which a major climate event, such as a drought, could catalyze transformational change. A drought and water management crisis that impacts much of the state could precipitate a positive social tipping point, giving opportunities for a charismatic leader to emerge from public outcry and mobilize it in a constructive direction. In this scenario, this movement pushes to reimagine how California manages natural resources through more sustainable and equitable policymaking. This could include rebalancing water management to be more equitable, institutionalizing and reorganizing resilience work by watershed, regulating data centers, and instantiating a “Western Water Alliance” to collaborate on shared solutions with other western states. Opposition from an antagonistic federal government and vested tech and agricultural interests might be overcome via public pressure and well-coordinated and well-resourced subnational policy reforms. In this scenario, advancing technology might be harnessed to mobilize social action, and the movement’s pro-social character could help inoculate it to transnational exploitation.
Opportunities and Next Steps
Addressing these challenges involves action ranging from public engagement to national and international tech governance. But the workshop highlighted key roles for state and local civil servants, emergency managers, media, and civil society. Given constrained funding and federal support, creative, mutually beneficial partnerships across sectors can be helpful. Participants explored realistic partnerships that might produce co-benefits for national security, disaster resilience, and information integrity, such as joint local public-private-academic information verification mechanisms, partnerships with real estate agents to gather and disseminate resilience information, and new relationship building between CAL FIRE and the state’s military communities and lands.
The exercise in California highlighted that the information environment following the LA wildfires was not an anomaly but is a persistent risk as AI systems proliferate, inequality gaps widen, and climate impacts worsen. Bad actors and grifters will continue to leverage the power of the attention economy to sow outrage and division in California and elsewhere unless the ease and/or profitability of such actions decreases. The event was the second exercise in a larger Center for Climate and Security project supported by the Knight Foundation on climate security, mis/disinformation, and democratic governance in the United States. The project will produce additional research, state and local practitioner resources, and engagements throughout 2026, where CCS will build on these insights and disseminate findings with key stakeholders.