Nature: Survey Shows Censorship & Suppression Of Environmental Science In Australia Getting Worse

[hatrack]

Environmental scientists in Australia say that they are under increasing pressure from their employers to downplay research findings or avoid communicating them at all. More than half of the respondents to an online survey thought that constraints on speaking publicly on issues such as threatened species, urban development, mining, logging and climate change had become worse in recent years1.

The findings, published this month in Conservation Letters, reflect how politicized debates about environmental policy in Australia have become, says Saul Cunningham, an environmental scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra. “We need our publicly funded institutions to be more vocal in defending the importance of an independent voice based on research,” he says. Australian scientists aren’t the only ones who have reported interference in science or pressure — particularly from government employers — to downplay research findings. Scientists in the United States, Canada and Brazil have also reported such intrusions in the past decade.

EDIT

One-third of government respondents and 30% of industry employees also reported that their employers or managers had modified their work to downplay or mislead the public on the environmental impacts of activities such as logging and mining. Government employers most commonly modified science reported for the media or for internal communications, but conference presentations and journal articles were also altered to downplay environmental impacts. A 2013 survey of more than 4,000 Canadian government scientists found a similar rate (24%) of information for the media being altered or excluded for non-scientific reasons. In Australia, public commentary was most commonly curtailed on issues related to threatened species. “The public often remains ‘in the dark’ about the true state and trends of many species,” wrote one survey respondent.

Managers modifying communications shared in government departments is particularly concerning, says ecologist Don Driscoll of Deakin University outside Melbourne, who led the study. It suggests that for controversial issues, such as the environmental impacts of mining or land clearing, “the information is not getting right through to the decision makers”.

EDIT

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02669-8

[Mickju]

1. Australia is under the thumb of the Murdoch press as much or more than we are.

Also the UK