I have been listening to the scientist Thelma Krug, then vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for nearly two decades. First, in the newsroom, when I was a reporter. Later, during the filming of the documentary Tomorrow Has Come. This week, we spoke again before I left for Paris to attend UNESCO’s first Global Conference on the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development, 2024 to 2033.
The subject was familiar. The context was not.
Thelma spoke about the dismantling of scientific capacity in some countries: funding cuts, the closure of research centers, the erasure of databases and the disappearance of the phrase “climate change” from official documents in the United States — something I also witnessed last year during a fellowship there. In her view, some of these losses may be irreversible.
The question that stayed with me was simple: How do we defend the integrity of climate information when the very production of knowledge is being weakened?
Thais Lazzeri, from FALA, at UNESCO
For the past five years, FALA has worked to understand the social, economic and democratic costs of disinformation. Along the way, as we developed the program Mentira Tem Preço (Lies Have a Price) and, more recently, the Information Integrity Observatory, we came to recognize a dimension of the problem that was largely absent from public debate: the vulnerability of science itself.
Coordinated attacks against researchers. Campaigns to discredit them. Intimidation. Harassment. Barriers to communicating evidence. Declining trust in scientific institutions. These processes are less visible than a false story going viral on social media, but their effects last longer. They undermine a society’s ability to produce reliable knowledge and turn it into public policy.
That realization gave rise to Bertha, a program inspired by the legacy of Bertha Lutz and designed to strengthen what I call the infrastructure of scientific trust: the capacity to analyze attacks on scientists and institutions, expand the circulation of evidence and bring science, communication and decision-making, including public debate, closer together.
Arriving at UNESCO’s conference and finding this discussion at the center of the international agenda was less a surprise than a confirmation.
Over the course of three days, I heard experts describe different facets of the same phenomenon.
The historian Maria Fernanda Rollo, a researcher with the UNESCO Chair on Biodiversity and Conservation for Sustainable Development, reminded us that academic freedom is a basic condition for the production of knowledge. Science was created to serve society, not governments — or corporations, I would add. Without freedom, there is no criticism. And without criticism, there is no science.
The scientist Heïdi Sevestre, a glaciologist and deputy secretary of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, brought a more combative perspective. Public pressure, so far, has not defeated either lobbying or climate disinformation. Future generations, she warned, will not forgive us for moving too slowly, because we already know what needs to be done. Ice, she reminded us, preserves the memory of the choices we make today.
Heïdi Sevestre on the screen, and Maria, third from the left
Marcelo Knobel, executive director of The World Academy of Sciences, drew attention to an equally strategic challenge: creating the conditions for evidence to circulate, be understood and earn legitimacy in society. Science has never been more important to the challenges we face, and never more contested.
There is a geopolitical dimension to this debate that deserves attention.
We are used to analyzing competition among countries through indicators such as technology, energy, trade or military capacity. At this conference, another strategic asset came into view: trust in science. Political fragmentation, the decline of international cooperation and the intentional weakening of scientific institutions are already having concrete effects on our ability to respond to the climate crisis, protect biodiversity and design public policies grounded in evidence.
Marcelo Knobel
It is no coincidence that one of the central goals of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development is to strengthen the relationship among science, public policy and society, with trust as a structural element of that process. It was in this context that UNESCO endorsed Bertha as one of the official initiatives of the Decade — the only communications program to be included in this international effort.
We received that recognition in the same way we begin every FALA project: by listening.
Because the best answers rarely begin with a brilliant idea. They begin when we pay attention to the questions the world has not yet been able to answer — or the ones we have not yet dared to ask.
And today, few questions seem as decisive as this one: Who protects the conditions that allow science to continue serving the public interest?
Disinformation is organized, and so is the response
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Hi! I’m Thais Lazzeri, founder and director of FALA, a Brazilian impact studio that drives social change through storytelling, communication, and strategy. I’m also the creator of Lies Have a Price (Mentira Tem Preço) and the Observatory for Information Integrity.
And I’m Rafael de Pino, Operations Manager at FALA and Coordinator of both Lies Have a Price and the Observatory for Information Integrity.
This makes me wonder whether trust is best understood not as a moral quality, but as infrastructure: largely invisible while it works, and suddenly obvious when it fails. The difficult question is how institutions detect its erosion before cooperation becomes impossible.