Divulgação científica como estratégia de enfrentamento à desinformação e ao negacionismo climático

Abstract

Serving as the foundation for social learning processes, communication is indispensable for human interaction because it provides the necessary context for the establishment of cultures and traditions. Although the different subjects of communication are widely recognized, presented, and discussed within social and discourse theories, little is known about the role of narrative presentations in establishing the social modus operandi. In this way, the scenario of disinformation and denialism emerges as an important threat to the establishment of a discourse based on science and to how populations perceive and respond to different risks, such as climate change. An innovative approach to addressing this dilemma must incorporate broad data on the risk perception of Brazilians as well as socioeconomic information, a gap that this work aims to address. For this purpose, we evaluated secondary data on the concern of Brazilians about climate change during the years 2020 to 2022. Working with a solid database, we sought to understand how political stance and exposure to disinformation affect climate concern under a quantitative parameter by creating indices that serve as variables of interest for analyses through cumulative link models. Our results revealed that the consumption of climate information is crucial for increasing concern about the topic and also showed that political stance is a key factor to consider when analyzing climate perception variables. Therefore, it is extremely important to develop communication strategies that consider the different nuances of Brazilians' climate concern to combat the effects of disinformation and climate denialism because the dissemination of misleading content can be extremely harmful and directly influence public decision-making based on false information, aggravating the situation of communities already suffering from the consequences of climate change.