The Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership Project brings together teaching staff and students across Europe to investigate the implications of climate denial and disinformation on democracy and public trust. In particular, the initiative will look into how to empower a young generation of designers to evaluate climate-related news, and to visualise the spread of disinformation. Climate Truth Crisis will deploy information design, video and visual storytelling to engage publics in the impact on democratic processes of industry lobbying, greenwashing, conspiracy theories and social media bots.

The first Teacher Training Activity of Climate Truth Crisis was hosted by Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts (UAL) in London. The goal was to map the contemporary disinformation discourse and discuss new pedagogical strategies to combat fake news and misinformation conspiracy theories.

The three-day program explored:

• teaching methods for classifying types of climate disinformation;
• research methods for finding points for intervention in complex problems;
• testing the creative limits of fake news.

Expert speakers gave overviews of their respective fields:

• social media analytics, Felipe Soares, London College of Communication (UAL)
• vision science, Simon Rushton, Cardiff University
• investigative journalism, Juliet Ferguson, Centre for Investigative Journalism
• climate activism, David Cross, CCW – Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges (UAL)

All talks were filmed and will soon be published on the Climate Truth Crisis website. The next student activity will take place from 7 to 11 April in Tallinn.

At KABK, Climate Truth Crisis is supervised and coordinated by Aparajita Dutta, Femke de Haan, Niels Schrader and Alice Twemlow. The project is funded by the Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership Project.