On New Year’s Day 2026, Occidental Mindoro’s Barangay Cabacao witnessed a devastating act of state violence. An aerial bombardment and strafing operation by the Armed Forces of the Philippines killed five civilians – three Mangyan-Iraya children and two student researchers – displaced 188 families, and led to the disappearance of 24-year-old Chantal Anicoche.

State authorities, led by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), justified the attack as a counterinsurgency operation against the New People’s Army. Yet this framing obscures a more troubling reality: Cabacao sits within a mineral-rich region where Indigenous resistance has long challenged the return of environmentally destructive mining operations, including those linked to Agusan Petroleum. What is presented as “security” is, in effect, the violent clearing of Indigenous land for extractive industry.

This incident is not isolated. It exemplifies the Philippines’ entrenched practice of “red-tagging” – the systematic branding of Indigenous Peoples, activists, and environmental defenders as “communists” or “terrorists.” Enabled by the Anti-Terrorism Act (2020) and operationalized through bodies such as the NTF-ELCAC, red-tagging creates the legal and political conditions for surveillance, harassment, and lethal force.

However, what is often overlooked is how climate disinformation now functions as a critical amplifier of this repression.

Climate disinformation does not merely mislead public understanding of environmental issues. In the Philippine context, it is strategically deployed to reinforce red-tagging narratives, portraying Indigenous resistance to mining, energy, and infrastructure projects as both anti-development and a threat to national security. By recasting environmental defenders as obstacles to “sustainable development” or even as “terrorists,” climate disinformation provides the ideological justification for state violence.

This convergence is deliberate. Narratives crafted by state actors and echoed by segments of the media falsely depict extractive projects as “green” or “necessary climate solutions,” while simultaneously criminalizing those who oppose them. In doing so, climate disinformation transforms legitimate environmental defense into a security threat – thereby legitimizing coercion, militarization, and even extrajudicial violence.

The consequences are stark. The Philippines is the deadliest country in Asia for environmental defenders and ranks fifth globally. Between 2012 and 2023, 298 environmental defenders were killed, including 17 in 2023 alone. Indigenous Peoples, who make up a disproportionate share of those killed, are at the center of this violence. 

At the same time, the intensifying climate crisis deepens Indigenous vulnerability. Ranked first globally for natural hazard risk in 2025, the Philippines exposes forest-dwelling Indigenous Peoples – already facing socio-economic marginalization – to heightened risks of displacement, food insecurity, and loss of livelihood. This makes the weaponization of climate narratives against them particularly insidious: those most affected by climate change are recast as its enemies.

Asia Centre’s latest report, “Climate Disinformation in the Philippines: Legitimizing Attacks on Indigenous Peoples,” identifies four key forms of disinformation driving this dynamic: the fabrication of Indigenous consent; greenwashing of extractive projects; promotion of false climate solutions; and the deflection of state and corporate accountability.

Each of these mechanisms directly reinforces red-tagging and its violent consequences.

First, portraying extractive projects as “sustainable” while labeling Indigenous opposition as “terrorism” enables military coercion under the guise of development and climate action. Second, manipulated consultation processes – combined with disinformation that obscures environmental harm – facilitate forced displacement from ancestral lands. Third, conspiracy narratives scapegoat Indigenous Peoples and activists, legitimizing legal persecution under counterterrorism frameworks. Finally, by framing resistance as a national security threat, these narratives create a climate of impunity in which enforced disappearances and killings become justifiable.

Taken together, these patterns reveal a crucial insight: climate disinformation is not incidental but instrumental. It is a strategic tool that strengthens red-tagging, aligns state violence with corporate interests, and normalizes the militarization of Indigenous territories.

The Philippine government’s “Whole-of-Nation” approach exemplifies this convergence. While ostensibly designed as a holistic security framework, it has institutionalized the militarization of resource-rich Indigenous lands. Climate disinformation sustains this model by providing its ideological backbone – casting extractive development as climate action, and Indigenous resistance as terrorism.

Red-tagging, in this context, must be understood not only as a security practice but as a form of climate disinformation in itself. It operates as a coordinated system that delegitimizes Indigenous claims, protects extractive industries, and enables state violence.

Viewed through this lens, the Cabacao New Year’s Massacre is not an aberration. It is the predictable outcome of a system in which disinformation, militarization, and economic interests converge.

Addressing this violence therefore requires more than condemning individual incidents. It demands dismantling the narratives that sustain them. As long as climate disinformation continues to frame Indigenous Peoples as enemies of development and security, it will remain a powerful tool for justifying their displacement, criminalization, and deaths.

This op-ed is based on Asia Centre’s report “Climate Disinformation in the Philippines: Legitimising Attacks on Indigenous Peoples.” Download the full report here. For more information about Asia Centre, visit https://www.asiacentre.org.