Truth as Resistance: Journalism’s Role in Defending Indigenous Asia

Journalism can help ensure that climate governance is guided by transparency, accountability, and justice.

Across South and Southeast Asia, climate action is being subverted by a deliberate, calculated strategy: the weaponization of climate disinformation. Governments and corporations are increasingly deploying misleading narratives – ranging from greenwashing to outright denial – to marginalize Indigenous peoples, facilitate land dispossession, and obscure ecological harm. 

This is a systematic campaign that threatens both human rights and the environmental integrity of the region. As these falsehoods harden into public consensus, the standard model of environmental reporting is no longer sufficient. 

In this clouded information environment, constructive journalism has a critical role to play. By scrutinizing official claims, exposing false climate solutions, and elevating the lived experiences of Indigenous communities, it can help ensure that climate governance is guided by transparency, accountability, and justice.

This is the key argument presented in Asia Centre’s newly published regional report, “Climate Disinformation in Asia: A Deliberate Strategy Against Indigenous Peoples.” The report synthesizes the findings from the broader series of country baseline studies to serve as a toolkit to advance the practice of constructive journalism in response to the growing challenge of climate disinformation in Asia.

The report finds that, across the region, climate disinformation is deployed as a deliberate strategy by selected corporations and governments against Indigenous peoples to access their ancestral lands for development.

Four main forms of climate disinformation are apparent. The first is one-sided media coverage, which selectively amplifies government and corporate narratives while downplaying ecological harm, Indigenous displacement, and government and corporate accountability for these harms.

The second is greenwashing, where corporations use misleading environmental claims and sustainability branding to obscure harmful practices and create a false impression of climate progress.

The third is the promotion of false climate solutions, which present unsustainable or exploitative programs as genuine climate action despite evidence of ecological harm and limited climate benefits.

The fourth is the outright denial of accountability, whereby governments and corporations reject, minimize, or deflect evidence of environmental harm and human rights abuses while shifting responsibility onto Indigenous communities, activists, and other marginalized groups. 

In addition, two regional-level trends can be observed. One, climate disinformation is increasingly reinforced by transnational political and corporate interests that replicate extractive narratives across borders. Two, digital platforms’ inability to moderate disinformation allows such content to proliferate.

Such concerted deployment of climate disinformation has a significant consequence on........

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