Inside Climate News

The Problem

Under President Jair Bolsonaro, record-breaking wildfires devastated over 9.6 million acres of Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands in a single year. Despite the visible destruction, the crisis was frequently dismissed as “disinformation” or propaganda during the high-stakes 2022 presidential election. This environment of aggressive climate denialism meant that even straightforward journalistic records were often subject to intense skepticism and public doubt.

The Solution

To provide irrefutable proof of the environmental crisis, Starling Lab collaborated with award-winning photojournalist Pablo Albarenga to deploy a novel authentication workflow. By tethering a professional Canon camera to a secure smartphone, the team cryptographically signed images and their contextual metadata at the moment of capture, registering these records on the IOTA blockchain. The final report utilized the “Four Corners” interactive display, empowering readers to independently verify the provenance and authenticity of each photograph.