New York-based public relations agency Teneo is advising the organisers of this November’s United Nations COP31 climate conference in Antalya, Turkey, despite its close ties to the fossil fuel industry.
The same agency came under fire two years ago for promoting COP29 host nation Azerbaijan as a climate champion, even as the country was expanding oil and gas production. The previous year, Teneo earned $1.6 million advising the oil-rich United Arab Emirates on its leadership of COP28 — a fee paid for by the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) via its renewables arm Masdar.
Teneo has worked with U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil, British oil and gas developer EnQuest and Australian coal and steel mining giant BHP within the past two years, according to research by DeSmog and campaign group Clean Creatives. The agency previously worked with ADNOC and U.S. oil major Chevron, as well.
Teneo’s services this year include developing the climate conference’s external messaging and providing Turkey’s COP31 team with media training and PR crisis management, according to a $3.9 million contract filed with the U.S. Department of Justice under laws that require American companies to report on work for foreign governments. The contract was first reported by communications industry news service O’Dwyer’s in July. The work began in April, the filing shows.
Almost every country in the world will gather for the summit, where co-hosts Turkey and Australia will try to get negotiators to break through years of sluggish climate action that have put the world on a path to catastrophic heating.
Global temperature rise is on the verge of exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius — the peak nations agreed to in 2015’s Paris climate pact — according to a U.N. report released on September 2. However, there is still time to keep heating below 2 degrees with actions that include “immediate implementation of measures that reduce global [greenhouse gas] emissions and slow the rate of warming,” including carbon dioxide and methane pollution created by fossil fuels, the report states.
In recent years, climate campaigners have increasingly highlighted the role of PR and advertising agencies in delaying climate action by painting polluting industries as green and essential to energy or food security.
Last year, 1,600 fossil fuel industry representatives attended COP30 in Belém, Brazil — a number surpassed only by host nation Brazil’s delegation, and more than all the other national delegates combined.
Brazil’s COP team controversially hired the PR agency Edelman — which has worked for decades with Shell and several other fossil fuel companies — to manage communications and press relations for the event.
A DeSmog investigation revealed that Edelman lobbied the Brazilians to choose one of its fossil fuel clients as the event’s energy provider.
Neither the COP31 team nor Teneo replied to a request for comment.
