I was part of a group of researchers contributing to an investigation into “Fossil fuel greenwash” with Global Witness as part of a broader collaboration on the politics of “nature-based solutions”.

Here’s an excerpt from the methodology section on the part we contributed to:

To examine the companies’ Twitter images, we worked with researchers from the Department of Digital Humanities at Kings College London and the Public Data Lab to collate images tweeted by the companies. This enabled us to review image and content over time, including coupled text.

Each advertisement and image tweet was analysed for subject matter and style. The text and any voiceover or speech were documented together with the item’s themes. These were assessed against the Climate Social Science Network’s definition of greenwashing (‘a variety of misleading communications and practices that intentionally or not, induce false positive perceptions of an organization’s environmental performance’) and the CMA’s Green Claims Code guidance on misleading environmental claims.