In January 2020, at the height of Australia\u2019s worst bushfires, the hashtag #ArsonEmergency went viral on social media. According to one narrative, the \u201cBlack summer\u201d fires that made front pages across the globe were not caused by climate change.<\/p>\n
The claim that nearly 200 \u201carsonists\u201d had been arrested for starting the fires was misleading. In reality, legal action had been taken against 183 people since November 2019 for fire-related offences, including minor crimes like improperly discarding cigarettes or not taking enough precautions around machinery. This was clearly outlined in a New South Wales (NSW) Police Force media release. In reality, only about 24 people had actually been charged.<\/p>\n
But by the time this false narrative, which was likely to have caused confusion and contributed towards weakened public debate and intimidation against activists and scientists, was debunked, it was too late. The fuel had already been poured on a blaze of misinformation, so to speak.<\/p>\n
Orchestrated counter-narratives like this are part of a broader wave of climate misinformation <\/a>and disinformation which Australian journalists say is worsening.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI definitely think it has ramped up, particularly with the political situation we see in the US,\u201d said Bianca Hall, The Age’s environment and climate reporter, and media vice president of Australia\u2019s Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), which is also an IFJ affiliate.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCuts to universities and research institutions more broadly have made getting accurate information more challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n Climate misinformation watchdogs have noted Australia\u2019s status as a significant hub for climate change misinformation due to the convergence of a powerful fossil fuel industry, concentrated media ownership, and a political landscape which historically leverages climate action as a wedge issue.<\/p>\n Misinformation among Australians in fact \u201cskyrocketed\u201d to 75%, an 11-point increase from 2022 to 2024, with climate change one of the top three issues where misinformation was encountered, according to the 2024 Digital News Report: Australia, published <\/a>by the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre. Climate disinformation has evolved from a communications problem into a “national security challenge\u201d which has consequences for economic and energy resilience, a report <\/a>by the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group (ASLCG) published in March 2026 warned. Australia\u2019s Senate Inquiry into Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy, also released the same month, said the country is facing a declining information integrity ecosystem around climate change and energy, which is already significantly impacting public policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n To illustrate the extent of the problem on a global scale, false or misleading content related to the COP30 climate summit increased by 267% between July and September 2025, with around 14,000 examples found online, according <\/a>to a report by Climate Action Against Disinformation and the Observatory of Climate Integrity.<\/p>\n First Draft, a now defunct global non-profit organisation dedicated to research and practice around misinformation and disinformation, found in the lead-up to the 2022 federal election there was a marked by a surge in orchestrated climate conspiracy theories, deliberately timed to coincide with extreme weather events. Where the 2019-2020 bushfires had seen misinformation emerge organically, the 2022 floods brought something more calculated: with international denialist narratives being adapted and localised for Australian audiences.<\/p>\n The political weaponisation of climate narratives has not abated. If anything, it has intensified. Martin Zavan, an ex-journalist and media advisor in the environment sector, now runs Sydney-based campaign and communications consultancy, Campaign Republic.<\/a> His clients have included the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, Greenpeace International and World Wildlife Fund (WWF).\u00a0<\/p>\n “The challenge in Australia is not simply that false information is inserted into the media,” he said. \u201cIt’s that the system tends to reward simple, confident claims, particularly when they come from powerful and influential voices.\u201d<\/p>\n This creates an environment, said Zavan, where misinformation can spread without being intentional, because speed, access and authority often take precedence over scrutiny. Climate misinformation is now taking the form of fabricated science, doctored images, astroturfing<\/a>, inflated cost modelling<\/a>, and disinformation by omission, among others.\u00a0<\/p>\n Journalists have always been deadline-driven. But in today\u2019s 24\/7 news cycle, they\u2019re up against the clock more than ever, said Hall, a journalist of more than two decades. Her team now has 6am, midday, 4pm, 8pm and then overnight rolling deadlines.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are trying to pitch stories towards different online editions to figure out how to sit within the news cycle,\u201d said Hall. \u201cIf there is big international news, do we hold off for 12 hours and try to pitch it into an online edition? We’re constantly trying to figure out how to get environment and climate news in front of the largest audience possible.\u201d<\/p>\n But being overstretched makes things hard.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFact checking breaking news has always been challenging, but when you\u2019re trying to fact check science on the spot, it\u2019s extremely challenging,\u201d said Hall. \u201cWe need more resources.\u201d<\/p>\n Leanne Minshull<\/a> is co-Chief Executive Officer of The Australia Institute. Its February 2026 report Lies of Emission<\/a> specifically examined the Australian government as a source of climate misinformation. Minshull<\/a> recalled one incident 18 months ago when credible journalists began reporting that Australia had a gas shortage.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn’t! We had a gas export crisis,\u201d she said. \u201cBut good journalists who people trust are so busy they don’t have the time to be critical of what information is being fed to them.\u201d<\/p>\n Now they must grapple with artificial intelligence (AI), too. AI is directly enabling climate misinformation via tools which dramatically lower the cost of content creation at scale, allowing the distribution of vast quantities of text, images, video and audio, the ASLCG report said.\u00a0<\/p>\n In perhaps what was one of the most alarming examples of how the technology is fuelling misinformation, a 2023 social media post claimed that a University of Tasmania study, published in prestigious international journal Marine Policy, had modelled that 400 whales per year would be killed by offshore wind turbines. But the paper did not exist. It was\u00a0generated by AI, with no citation references, authors, or any supporting evidence.<\/a> It wasn\u2019t until Associate Professor Michelle Voyer, a journal associate editor, came across it that it was exposed.<\/p>\n It\u2019s these sort of cases that Ketan Joshi, an Australian climate writer and communications consultant based in Oslo, predicted. Joshi has been writing about and working with a range of climate and energy groups since 2010. He says that what he’s now seeing is trove of machine-generated content going into the public information and media space.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy theory a few years ago was that there would be a huge proliferation of fake science papers created using AI,\u201d he said. \u201cIt’s going a little bit more in the direction of emotionally arresting content. Generative AI is much better at creating a shocking video that’s almost like a cartoon of wind turbine whales.\u201d<\/p>\n Hall added that AI is presenting \u201cquite almost existential challenges to reporting more broadly\u201d. As a result, she said that she always tries to rely on science, such as peer-reviewed journals, as much as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of really great citizen scientists who are doing some amazing work, monitoring greater glider numbers in forests, or using things like AI-enabled heat sensors to find where native animals are and whether the numbers are increasing or decreasing,\u201d she said. \u201cSo we do try to use their knowledge as well where we can.\u201d<\/p>\n While staff journalists are facing barriers in reporting on climate change, for freelancers\u00a0it can be equally challenging to convince editors to cover it in the first place, said Lyndal Rowlands. She works primarily as a senior journalist for Al Jazeera but also freelances and specialises in climate reporting. The topic is constantly seen as a long-term problem happening somewhere off in the future, she explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBut those (Black Summer) fires were such a massive, massive moment in Australia,\u201d said Rowlands. \u201cAnd yet it didn’t lead to a substantial increase in climate change journalism in Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n She said that one thing that climate journalists could do right now is educate people across newsrooms and beyond to realise that many critical stories have a climate angle and the issue doesn\u2019t have to be covered separately all the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n While Rowlands added that journalists were more squeezed than ever, she points to resources available such as the Covering Climate Now <\/a>guidelines to help them along. Such resources could be more readily available and distributed across newsrooms.<\/p>\n Even with the acknowledged challenges, Rowlands added that the one critical thing reporters can do is provide their readers with context.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hall said her team actually noticed that relentlessly negative environmental news was actually turning the audience off.\u00a0It warranted a change in thinking and delivery.<\/p>\n \u201cSo we adopted a new practice in line with a positive, solutions-based journalism approach, which is trying to offer some kind of hope and path forward for people,\u201d she said. \u201cWhether that’s electrifying the home, or ways that reefs can be reconstructed to help cool and clean coastal waters, we’re trying to where we can offer some of that, as well as the negative news we need to cover.\u201d<\/p>\n There are other bright spots within the country\u2019s existing media framework. Joshi singled out Jess Davis and Jo Lauder from the ABC’s dedicated Climate Team as doing strong work locally, alongside international outlets like Carbon Brief, Drilled and Emily Atkin’s Heated newsletter, which are building loyal audiences by treating climate as a corruption and accountability story as much as an environmental one.<\/p>\n A silver lining may be that Australians are the most concerned about misinformation globally, according to The Digital News Report: Australia 2025. Nearly three quarters (74%) are worried about fake news and misinformation, placing the country at the top of the global index across 48 surveyed.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n But concern alone won\u2019t be enough. Australia\u2019s per capita CO\u2082 emissions are roughly three times the global average, meanwhile the country is the world’s third largest fossil fuel exporter.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn Australia, we have this tradition where people say \u2018oh it\u2019s not the time to talk about it\u2019,\u201d said Rowlands of the climate issue. \u201c\u2018Don\u2019t politicise it.\u2019 But it\u2019s so politicised already.\u00a0<\/p>\n Amy Fallon an Australian journalist and media consultant who has worked from five continents mostly on human rights issues for global media and non-government organisations. She is also a member of IFJ\u2019s Australian affiliate \u2013 the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA). She was commissioned by the IFJ Asia-Pacific as part of the IFJ\u2019s global climate misinformation project funded by UNESCO\u2019s Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In January 2020, at the height of Australia\u2019s worst bushfires, the hashtag #ArsonEmergency went viral on social media.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[311288,64,63,98076,68,277475,52676,44,53609],"class_list":["post-642987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-amy-fallon","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bushfires","tag-climate-change","tag-ifj","tag-misinformation","tag-news","tag-unesco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}