University of Gothenburg
Plakat från demonstration: The climate is changeing, why aren't we?
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IFORCED – Institute for Research on Climate Obstruction and Disinformation

Research networks
Active research
Project period
2025 - ongoing
Project owner
The Department of Sociology and Work Science
Financier
Formas
Area
Sustainability and environment Society and economy
Topic
Sociology

Short description

Why does society fail to take climate change seriously? That is the question at the heart of IFORCED, Institute for Research on Climate Obstruction and Disinformation. IFORCED brings together scholars from Northern Europe and beyond, with University of Gothenburg serving as its hub. 

Background

For almost four decades, anthropogenic climate change has been recognized by global leaders and the scientific community as a threat to human and more-than-human communities. As effects of our use of energy and resources rising sea-levels and rising temperatures, intense heatwaves and extreme precipitation events are destabilizing the conditions for human and non-human life on the planet. Still, we haven’t managed to bend the emissions curve, and, in fact, global carbon dioxide emissions are roughly 60 percent higher than they were in 1990. 

One reason for failure is the organized campaign by fossil fuel interests and conservative foundations in the USA and beyond. This campaign – which has been called a “Climate Change Denial Machine” or a “Climate Change Countermovement” – has roots going back to the 1960s and 1970s but became more coherent and prominent in the early 1990s. 

About IFORCED

Within IFORCED, we are not only looking at the fossil fuel industry to try to understand why the supposedly environmentally progressive Northern European countries have not managed to transition away from fossil fuels. Our historical research shows how climate change was used to defend nuclear and the high energy society in the 1970’s but was later removed as an object from national politics. Here, ecomodern discourse played a key role to dismiss and obstruct calls for an energy transition in the early 1990’s and it was only in the late 2000s that explicit climate change denial started to feature in the Swedish public debate to any degree. Lately, however, climate change has become a polarizing issue just as in the USA, with influential far-right parties and a significant far-right digital media system, spreading doubt about climate science and climate policy. 

IFORCED builds on more than a decade of research and collaboration. The initiative originated in publications from 2014, and two international conferences organized in Norrköping, Sweden, in 2016 and 2018. This collaboration was formalized as CEFORCED in 2018. Since then, we have published several peer-reviewed articles, books, and popular science articles, organized two international conference (together with the Zetkin-collective), and appeared frequently on national and international media. Scholars within the project are regularly asked to comment on current events and to hold public talks. 

Other Publications

Research articles

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