By Tom Ellison and Erin Sikorsky

Today CCS released two new briefers on critical and related topics in climate security: mis- and disinformation, and geoengineering. 

The first, “Climate Security and Misinformation: A Baseline” offers a framework and overview on how intensifying climate change and policy responses create openings for bad actors to spread mis- and disinformation. These challenges extend beyond climate denialism and intersect with the breadth of direct and indirect climate security risks, ranging from the scapegoating of climate disasters on adversaries, to incitement against climate migrants and protesters, to misleading obstruction of the energy transition, to state efforts to stoke climate- and energy-related divisions in their adversaries. Amid rapidly evolving digital technology and low trust, addressing these challenges means closing knowledge gaps, designing climate policies with disinformation pitfalls in mind, and more aggressively countering climate mis- and disinformation, akin to election interference or vaccine denial.

Meanwhile, “Geoengineering and Climate Change in an Age of Disinformation and Strategic Competition” dives deep into the debate about the risks and benefits of exploring geoengineering, particularly solar radiation management, a nascent climate intervention technique that would aim to artificially dim the sun and ameliorate global warming. A steady drumbeat of reports from governments and scientific institutions argue for developing research programs to allow for better informed decisions on the risks and benefits of geoengineering. At the same time, the national security community is raising concerns emphasizing the risk of large-scale, successful unilateral deployment by a middle or rogue power. However, the more acute, near-term security risks associated with geoengineering have little to do with the ultimate effect of such interventions, but instead with the perceptions of such interventions or even research and testing of such technologies, particularly in a world shaped by geopolitical competition, growing divides between the Global North and Global South, and dis/misinformation.