25 Sep 2026 “Radio gets there first” – Community communicators make the case for local media as climate infrastructure
At Festival Compartilhe, WACC partners from four Latin American countries described how climate disinformation lands in their territories – and launched a new WACC publication advocating for community communication to be funded as climate infrastructure.
Climate disinformation is no longer mainly about denying that the climate is changing. It is about who gets blamed for climate change.
This was the starting point of the panel WACC convened on 24 September at Festival Compartilhe, a three-day gathering on communication, technology, and digital rights hosted by our partner ARTIGO 19 in São Paulo, Brazil.
The session “Building trust through democratic and local communication: An antidote to climate disinformation” brought together communicators from WACC partner organizations in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela who work along Latin America’s extractive frontiers.
Their accounts testified to a clear and familiar pattern: Environmentalism is recast as a “globalist agenda,” those defending their territories as “enemies of progress,” and extractivism as the only possible path forward.
Climate disinformation of this kind is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but a tactic used by the powerful to defend the status quo – amplified by generative artificial intelligence and timed to spike with each fire, flood and drought that reaches the headlines.
Community-led antidotes to climate disinformation
WACC Laureate Magali do Nascimento Cunha, editor of the fact-checking initiative Bereia, mapped out how climate denialism circulates in Brazil through religious digital networks, far outside conventional information circuits. Confronting it, she argued, requires going beyond verification to occupy those spaces of trust.
“Radio gets there first,” said Jéssica Santos, who produces and presents a newscast about the Amazon carried by 20 stations across seven Brazilian states of the region for the Amazon Radio Network (RNA). She underlined that, where local, trustworthy journalism reaches communities first, it is the best defense for the rainforest against the disinformation narratives that follow.
Ana Müller, founder of the Mesa de Comunicación Popular de Salta y Jujuy, spoke from her context in the Argentine Puna, a remote, high-altitude desert plateau in the Andes where lithium extraction and conflict over water are reshaping the territory.
Whoever controls the infrastructure, controls the narrative, she said. The community radio stations and community internet networks she works with are “a form of territorial defense.”
When young people in Venezuela’s Andean páramos tell the story of their own ecosystems, “communication becomes environmental education and an act of care for the territory,” noted Yorman Galviz, of Asociación Civil EscuChamos and the Guardianes de los Páramos Andinos project.
Communities that run their own networks decide what information circulates through them, according to Daniela Parra, who coordinates content at REDES A.C. in Mexico. Technological sovereignty becomes another name for territorial autonomy.
Local media essential to build trust in communication
The panelists kept returning to the unique and foundational role that local media play to stop climate disinformation.
Factchecking is necessary, they agreed – particularly in an election year in Brazil, and all the more so after COP30, where 27 countries and the European Union backed the first international declaration on climate information integrity.
But verification only addresses the claim, not the condition that lets it spread.
Panel members stressed that many people no longer trust official and scientific climate messaging, or the mainstream media that carries it. But local communicators – rooted in the places they serve – are among the few actors still able to rebuild that trust.
“Factchecking corrects a claim. Community media builds the relationship that makes the correction believable in the first place,” said Lorenzo Vargas, WACC’s director of programmes, who moderated the session.
Filling the infrastructure gap
What such community media initiatives lack is not commitment but foundations – stable funding, an enabling regulatory environment, and technical support. Vargas commented that several of the panelists are building the infrastructure of a more democratic communication system while still needing to depend on the very platforms that distort the information they are communicating.
This argument is set out at greater length in “Filling the Infrastructure Gap: Why we need democratic communication and information to achieve climate justice,” a WACC advocacy resource in English, French, and Spanish launched during the festival week and presented at the close of the panel.
“Communities cannot participate in decisions they do not know about, advocate for their rights without evidence, or hold decisionmakers to account when information is inaccessible or manipulated,” Vargas pointed out during the resource launch.
He highlighted the position paper’s case studies of local media run by WACC partners in Colombia, Nepal, and Nigeria, and nine-point framework for climate justice advocacy.
A forest of networks
Ahead of the festival, WACC convened community, Indigenous, and Quilombola (descendants of Enslaved Afro-Brazilians) organisations for a first working session on a telecommunications training program for community-centered connectivity initiatives in Brazil, hosted by the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra.
Over two days, participants mapped existing initiatives, defined the profile of program participants, and began grouping content into modules. They closed by drawing a collective picture of what they were building, naming it Floresta de Redes – a forest of networks.
It is an apt image for the argument WACC took to São Paulo. Networks, like forests, are infrastructure – slow to grow, easy to clear, and far more valuable standing.
—WACC works in partnership with ARTIGO 19 and other communication rights and sustainable development organizations worldwide through our Communication for All Program (CAP), with support from Bread for the World-Germany.
Download your copy of Filling the Infrastructure Gap: Why we need democratic communication and information to achieve climate justice!
Available in English, French, and Spanish.
Top image: Panellists and moderator of the WACC-convened session “Building trust through democratic and local communication” at Festival Compartilhe. Left to right: Lorenzo Vargas, Yorman Galviz, Ana Müller, Daniela Parra, Magali Cunha, Jessica Santos, Vilma Pena. | Middle image: Building a “Forest of Networks.” Participants of the WACC-convened design workshop ahead of Festival Compartilhe show their vision for a training program for community-centered connectivity in Brazil. Photos: WACC.
This article was initially drafted with AI assistance and subsequently reviewed and edited by staff.