Meteorologists expect the El Niño now building in the Pacific Ocean to be the strongest on record, peaking between September and December. This recurring warming of surface ocean waters occurs irregularly every two to seven years, temporarily raising global temperatures and reshaping rainfall worldwide.

The UN World Food Programme estimates the El Niño on the horizon could push, at minimum, 49 million people into acute food insecurity by the end of 2027 – across 45 countries already struggling to feed their populations, with the sharpest increases in Central America and southern Africa (WFP, 2026).

In South Asia, new research shows that global warming is strengthening the link between El Niño and drought in India. In Latin America, maize and bean harvests may fail in fragile parts of Nicaragua, and irrigated crops in Colombia and northeastern Brazil will most likely face water restrictions. This impacts food security further away as well; the EU imports close to 190 billion Euro of food a year from the regions most exposed. And in Europe directly, low river flows threaten hydropower and agriculture.

Those are the numbers. What concerns us at WACC just as much, however, is the story that will be told about the numbers – and how that story might affect action on climate change.

As much of the media coverage of the issue explains, El Niño is a natural cycle. However, scientists are clear that this year’s fires and heatwaves, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, are driven by fossil fuel emissions, not by El Niño, which only adds perhaps a tenth or two of a degree to a long-term warming trend.

This is creating fertile ground for disinformation campaigns seeking to deny or minimize climate change. Most advance the notion that the extreme weather events we are experiencing are a naturally occurring phenomenon and not caused by human activity.

This pattern is already visible. When Europe’s record heatwave arrived in June, social media filled with claims that the temperatures were nothing unusual, citing London heatwaves from the 1970s. After the 2024 floods in eastern Spain that killed more than 230 people, false claims spread that dams had been deliberately dismantled and that European river restoration rules caused the disaster, disinformation amplified by far-right Vox politicians.

Disinformation is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but “a tactic” the powerful use to defend the status quo, notes Philip Newell of the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) network. It appears, however, that the tactic has shifted.

Outright denial has largely given way to attacks on climate policy itself, amplified by generative AI and spiking whenever a heatwave, flood, or drought makes the news – which is precisely when affected communities need trustworthy information the most.

This is precisely why democratic and people-centred communication and information ecosystems, especially at the local level, are vital climate stability infrastructures that protect us all, not an optional extra.

Our partners across the world show what that looks like. For example:

• Grupo COMUNICARTE has spent decades among the people in Colombia’s high-altitude Andean páramos ecosystem, weaving conservation into local recipes, elders’ stories, and mountain legends until protection became something communities owned rather than something imposed by the authorities.
• Nepal’s Indigenous Rights Foundation broadcasts dialogues between Indigenous communities, government officials, and hydropower developers, reaching roughly a million people and making decision-makers publicly accountable.
• In the Niger Delta in Nigeria, the Media Awareness and Justice Initiative helps communities collect their own environmental data, turning complaints dismissed as anecdotal into evidence-backed reports.

None of these interventions are fact-checking operations, which is how disinformation tends to be tackled. Rather, these initiatives do something that is both more difficult and more durable – they build trust, they treat farmers and elders as knowledge holders alongside scientists, and they keep local narratives at the centre.

Disinformation struggles in places where people already know whom to believe.

At the UN climate change conference COP30 last November, 12 governments signed a first-ever “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” promising what Brazil’s president, João Brant, called “a wave of truth.”

This is a welcome development. However, in most of the places El Niño will hit hardest, the key channels informing communities and fighting disinformation – community radio stations, Indigenous media networks, and local journalists – work on very little.

Funding, supporting, and protecting them is not charity nor is it optional. It is climate action.

Photo: Toa55/Shutterstock

Such is the case of Radio Stereo Ideal 98.9 FM, a community radio station based in Tena, in Ecuador’s Amazon region, that WACC visited recently in the context of our Voices of the Amazon project.

The Amazon rainforest is a major carbon sink, a vital source of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and a pivotal mechanism for local and global climate stability. However, multiple social and environmental challenges are contributing to degradation of the region that is bringing it to climate tipping points.

In Napo province, the area served by Radio Ideal, gold mining is one of these challenges. Its large-scale dredging of rivers, use of mercury to separate gold from sediment, and deforestation to make way for open pit mining have a devastating impact. Substances used for extraction have an adverse effect on water quality and fishing. Contamination of rivers also means they cannot be used for tourism, Napo’s main economic activity.

In the long term, this contributes to unemployment, poverty, and social tension as communities become split between those supporting gold mining and those opposing it. There are also many reports of state officials failing to uphold environmental regulations and judicial rulings against extraction due to bribes and threats from actors involved in mining, making the situation even more difficult to address.

Radio Ideal, in operation since 1993, is a central actor in holding local decision makers accountable and in helping to organize local civil society to challenge the activities that are destroying the rain forest.

The station has positioned itself as the only media outlet in Napo, an area with very limited internet connectivity, that provides a platform for local communities to express themselves. With a 600-watt transmitter, its broadcasting reaches most cities in the province, where 75 percent of the population is Indigenous, of the Kichwa nation. A quarter of the station’s programming is in the Kichwa language, and one of its two studios is owned by a local Kichwa community.

Radio Ideal’s motto? “The communities do not have to come to the radio station—the radio station must go to the communities.” Its broadcasters have been “in the trenches” covering local protests, visiting mining sites, and questioning the decisions of local officials.

It has also instated an open-door policy meaning that anyone whose vision aligns with that of the station—rooted in human rights and the protection of nature—is welcome to a space on the programming grid. This has led to multiple alliances: with Indigenous organizations, a network of community reporters, sustainable tourism leaders, environmental activists, local business owners, women’s groups, advocates for the rights of people with disabilities, and allied legislators and policy makers.

In other words, the station has contributed to a local ecosystem of support and advocacy in which it plays the role of connector, convener, and bridge builder.

This collaborative approach, with the radio station as a platform, has enabled the environmental movement in Napo to score some major wins: the suspension of an open pit mining license between 2020 and 2023, the removal of two corrupt provincial government officials from office, the appointment of members of the movement as provincial ombudsperson and their election to the national legislature.

These wins have sown the seeds of a political movement that hopes to one day convince local power to finally put an end to mining across Napo. Though mining, deforestation, and water pollution continue, the local environmental movement and the radio station have managed to articulate a different vision of development: one where people do not have to destroy their forests and rivers to meet their basic needs. And they are inviting local communities to a conversation about translating this vision to reality.

The work of this station is a good reminder that while many of the current efforts to address climate change, like energy transition and reforestation, are essential, we mustn’t ignore the role of communication, information, and media actors in turning the situation around. 

Democratic and inclusive media and information systems enable local actors to influence local policies in a positive way. They shed light on the local drivers that fuel environmental degradation. And they contribute to a social climate in which concerns for environmental issues can translate into genuine political will and meaningful action.

The solutions to climate change must be rooted in a clear understanding of local dynamics, including people’s livelihoods, local economies, and local power dynamics.

In WACC’s experience, it is impossible for locally relevant solutions to emerge without healthy and democratic local communication ecosystems that enable the most affected communities to be heard and to advance their own solutions.

Failing to pay attention to such communication issues risks condemning many of the policies currently being rolled out to failure. The work of actors such as Radio Ideal is vital not just for local communities in Tena but for all of us.

David Granja, director of Radio Ideal in Ecuador’s Amazon region. Photo: WACC

Learn about WACC’s support for grassroots organizations using communication rights to advance climate justice.

In their Nairobi Declaration from the Summit, African heads of state and government committed to focusing “economic development plans on climate-positive growth, including expansion of just energy transitions and renewable energy generation for industrial activity, climate-aware and restorative agricultural practices, and essential protection and enhancement of nature and biodiversity.”

National and international journalists at a Summit side event organised by the Kenya Editors’ Guild confessed to lacking sufficient knowledge to communicate climate change effectively.

Carbon sinks and decarbonisation, greenhouse gases, clean cooking, ecosystems stewardship, climate-positive investments, and carbon tax — it seems the language of climate action is lost on many.

If this conversation is any indicator of sentiments in mainstream newsrooms, ordinary citizens with a crucial role in climate action will be no wiser about what is required of them.

Enter community media journalists. They, by all indications, are well versed in climate journalism, that is, the skill of gathering, evaluating and presenting information about climate change and climate action.

Anecdotal evidence from rural Kenya indicates a strong presence of climate programming on community radio. Even more impressive is the greater understanding of climate concepts by rural populations compared to those in urban areas.

For example, in a recent communication, a farmer articulated the science of climate change fluently and expressed intrigue as to why carbon credit funds are disbursed in her village with no conditions attached. She wondered why, at the very least, there was not an obligation to use a portion of such funds for a climate action activity.

A recent study by Mike S. Schäfer, Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich, and James Painter, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, raises two important issues:

• the scarcity of specialist climate journalists particularly in the Global South
• a “strong and rising influence of stakeholder PR on climate journalism”

Taking bold climate action means dedicating resources to community media, supporting them to effectively communicate about climate issues and to hold off capture by special interest groups. To save a planet in crisis, we need community media.

Photo: Javier Miranda on Unsplash

Learn More

Discover in Communicating Climate Justice how effective climate action needs the local voice of community media — communication for all. Available for purchase from CCR.