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Edelman, the world’s largest public relations agency, is in talks to work with the Cop30 team organising the UN climate summit in the Amazon later this year despite its prior connections to a major trade group accused of lobbying to roll back measures to protect the area from deforestation, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal.
The summit is set to take place in November in the city of Belém on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, which has been ravaged by deforestation linked to Brazil’s powerful agriculture industry. For the first time, the talks will be “at the epicenter of the climate crisis”, the summit’s president wrote last week. “As the Cop comes to the Amazon, forests will naturally be a central topic,” he added.
But now questions are being asked about a possible conflict of interest after his team confirmed to the Guardian and CCR that it is considering bringing in the American PR giant Edelman to work on the summit. As well as its past work with some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, Edelman previously developed a “communications strategy” and message “playbook” for a trade group representing major players in the Brazilian soy industry, according to US Foreign Agent Registration Act filings.
“Edelman’s conflicts of interest at a climate conference are almost too many to count,” said Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, which campaigns for the PR and ad industry to cut ties with fossil fuel clients. He said the agency “maintains at least a dozen contracts with fossil fuel polluters like Shell and Chevron”.
“These conflicts of interest make it impossible for Edelman to be effective advocates for Cop30’s agenda, and put the outcome of the talks in jeopardy.”
Edelman defends its approach, saying it works with a range of companies and organizations to help clients reduce emissions while meeting global energy demands.
Brazil is the world’s largest producer and exporter of soy. Rather than directly owning farms, most of the major companies in the country’s soy industry source from a complex network of suppliers across Brazil. Members of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oils Industry group, known as Abiove, include the biggest soy traders, such as Cargill, Bunge and Cofco. JBS, the controversial Brazilian meatpacker whose complex beef supply chain has been linked to deforestation of the Amazon, is also a member.
Abiove members agreed in 2006 not to source soy from recently cleared tracts of the Amazon, a major milestone that experts credit with drastically reducing the impact of the industry on deforestation in the region. But in 2022, an investigation by the Guardian – in collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Greenpeace Unearthed, Repórter Brasil and Ecostorm – revealed that Cargill had bought soy from a farm linked to deforestation in the Amazon. And recently, Abiove has been seeking to amend the 2006 moratorium which campaigners worry will put the rainforest in jeopardy once again.
Meanwhile, deforestation has continued apace elsewhere. Driven in part by the country’s booming soy industry, deforestation of the Cerrado, a vast grassland in central Brazil, has reached record levels in recent years. The campaign group Global Witness has described it as an “ecological catastrophe” for the world’s most biodiverse savannah.
An agreement similar to the Amazon’s soy moratorium was first mooted for the Cerrado in 2017 by a group of 60 NGOs. Nearly two dozen major companies, including McDonald’s, Tesco and Walmart, supported its aims. In 2020, the head of Abiove said that such an agreement for the Cerrado was “unfeasible”.
Between 2017 and 2023 (the most recent data available), 520,200 hectares of the Cerrado – an area larger than the Grand Canyon national park – were cleared and planted with soy, according to figures provided to the Guardian and CCR by the research group Trace. This was significantly higher than in any other biome: over the same period, there were 146,800 hectares cleared for soy planting in the Amazon, the group said.
Cargill and JBS have said they are taking efforts to help curb deforestation.
Edelman was hired by Abiove in 2023 to develop an “overarching communications strategy” and “message architecture playbook”, a copy of a contract filed with the US Department of Justice shows. The firm was paid $75,000 over a three-month period for work including “narrative development” and “risk analysis and scenario planning”.
The firm was also scoping a potentially more lucrative second phase of its work with Abiove, which involved “coalition building” and an “ongoing communications program”. This second phase could have generated more than $50,000 per month for the agency, according to estimates included in the contract.
A spokesperson for Edelman said its contract with Abiove ended in December 2023. They declined to answer questions about whether its work with Abiove involved developing messaging on deforestation and if it had informed the Cop30 team of its prior relationship with the group. Abiove did not respond to a request for comment.
While press reports last month suggested Edelman had already been awarded the Cop30 contract, a spokesperson for the summit said a final decision had not yet been made. “The Brazilian Cop30 presidency is in talks with multiple consulting firms, including Edelman,” the spokesperson said. “The hiring process will involve an open bid conducted through the UNDP [United Nations Development Program].”
If Edelman were to ultimately win a bid to work on Cop30 in Brazil, it would be the second time in three years it has been closely involved in efforts to deliver one of the major UN climate summits.
Edelman was hired by the United Arab Emirates team hosting Cop28 in Dubai in 2023. One of Edelman’s managing directors – a former deputy press secretary for Donald Trump during his first term – was working as the summit’s president Sultan Al Jaber’s “media support”, according to an internal Cop28 document previously reported by CCR. The agency’s work with Al Jaber, who alongside his role as the UAE’s climate envoy now heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, dates back to the mid-2000s, DoJ filings show.
Edelman’s work on Cop28 came after a period of intense scrutiny of the agency’s relationship with one of the world’s biggest oil producers, ExxonMobil, and other major fossil fuel companies.
A petition circulated at Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021 by campaign group Clean Creatives called on Edelman to cut its ties with the industry. But during a videoconference for employees that year to address the issue, Richard Edelman was reportedly resolute: the agency would not walk away from its fossil fuel clients, he told staff, according to a New York Times report at the time.
In a blogpost on the company’s website reflecting on the summit in Glasgow, Edelman praised a number of “commendable” pledges including ones to end deforestation and cut methane emissions. The summit will “serve as an important milestone in the march towards progress,” it said.
According to Clean Creatives, Edelman’s work with ExxonMobil has since ended but the group claims that in recent years it has inked contracts with three more fossil fuel companies. An Edelman spokesperson said one of those three, the South African energy company Sasol, is no longer a client.
Last year, the Guardian revealed that the agency had also recently worked for the Charles Koch Foundation, which is part of the libertarian network of nonprofits funded by the billionaire Koch family that has pushed back against climate policies.
“Edelman works with a wide range of companies, associations and organizations across every sector of the global energy industry,” a statement posted on the agency’s website states. “We are proud of the work we do to support our energy clients as they work to reduce emissions while continuing to provide reliable, affordable, and ever cleaner energy to meet the demands of a growing global population.”
