Climate Misinformation Surveillance with Multidimensional GIS

This research project aims to tackle the pressing issue of misinformation, especially concerning climate change, by leveraging the powers of GIS. Despite numerous efforts to combat misinformation, its prevalence continues to rise, influencing public perceptions and derailing climate policy debates and decisions. This proposal identifies and addresses several key challenges: the absence of effective tools for geospatial mapping and analyses of climate misinformation alongside climate data, the limited understanding of how climate misinformation spreads geographically, and the lack of effective tools to visualise the interplay of geospatial, temporal, and topical patterns of climate misinformation. To address these challenges, we propose the development of a Multidimensional Geographic Information System (GIS). This GIS will integrate climate data (temperature, precipitation, wind, carbon emission), climate misinformation data from fact-checkers and traditional and social media platforms, analyse its correlations with geographical and climate information, and enhance our predictive capabilities to counter the spread of misinformation effectively and proactively. The next three Conference Of the Parties (COP) will be used as use cases to train and evaluate our research and outcomes. This project, ClimateSense, aims to maximise the capabilities of GIS, enabling it to significantly influence societal understanding and policymaking in the face of climate change and misinformation.