FOR RELEASE SEPTEMBER 30, 2025

The New Climate Narrative: New Forum One report shows AI is reshaping who gets credit, donors, and attention on climate — and NGOs are at risk of being sidelined

Washington, D.C. — September 30, 2025 — Forum One today released The New Climate Narrative, a first-of-its-kind analysis showing how generative AI and AI answers are shaping how people understand climate, which organizations are seen as credible, or where to take action. AI is rapidly becoming the primary gateway to public climate knowledge. An estimated 45 million climate-related searches occur monthly, and AI answers are increasingly the end point for users rather than a path to websites.

“AI is not neutral about who counts — it reflects the citation pathways we’ve created across government, media, and the web,” said Steven Bond, Vice President of Strategy and Report Author. “Through our research, we’ve learned that If nonprofits, climate groups, and scientists want to influence how people learn and discover climate information they must invest in the pipelines AI listens to: credible research, media partnerships, and structured content that intermediary institutions will cite.”

Drawing on 30,000 AI-generated responses to 100 high-volume climate prompts across five countries (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, India and Australia) collected daily from August 15–September 13, 2025, the report maps who is being cited by Google’s AI Overviews and OpenAI models, which source types dominate, and where nonprofit climate organizations are winning—or losing—visibility.

Key findings
Source imbalance: Reference and institutional sources dominate. Across analyzed answers, reference (e.g., Wikipedia) and institutional (e.g., NASA, IPCC, EPA) domains accounted for the largest share of citations; NGOs comprised only a small fraction of cited sources.

• NGO fragmentation hands authority to non-NGO sources. AI systems reward the link and mention networks they can see. Because NGOs seldom cite one another, models default to corporations, major media, and government sites as the “established” experts.
• Who’s affected depends on the organization’s role. Groups that require on-site transactions (e.g., grantmaking bodies) are buffered from AI’s effects; organizations that rely on donors or volunteers are far more vulnerable to being overlooked in AI answers.
• “Best of” and donation prompts are dominated by outside lists. Questions like “best climate org to donate to” frequently surface corporate listicles and nontraditional ranking sites rather than established nonprofit evaluators. Those lists are being treated as authoritative by AI.
• Government and reference institutions exert outsized influence. NASA, EPA, IPCC, and other government/reference domains are heavily cited — especially for definitional and data queries — meaning changes to those sources would quickly shift AI outputs.
• NGOs can either shape answers or be named in them — rarely both. AI tends to produce two distinct outcomes: (a) an organization is cited as an expert shaping the answer (issue influence) or (b) it’s listed as an organization to support (brand visibility). Very few NGOs achieve both simultaneously.

“Our findings only amplify what we’ve known about the changing playbook for mission-driven communications,” shared Sarah Carroll, Forum One Director, Marketing & Communications and report author. “Nonprofit marketing, communications, and technology teams need to work cross-functionally to effectively in reaching their audiences where they are or risk losing not just visibility but the credibility that drives knowledge, narrative, donations and action.”

About the report
The New Climate Narrative is available now from Forum One. The report offers detailed findings, prompt-level analysis, and concrete steps that climate and nonprofit leaders can take to build or protect visibility in an AI-shaped information environment.

About Forum One
Forum One is a digital agency that partners with mission-driven organizations to advance impact through strategy, design, and technology. Forum One helps organizations navigate digital shifts and design resilient communications strategies. For more, visit www.forumone.com.

Media contact & interview requests
Forum One
Email: inquiries@forumone.com
Website: https://www.forumone.com/contact/
Report and press materials: The New Climate Narrative (full report available upon request).