King's researchers awarded grant to tackle health disinformation in the Canadian Arctic

A team from King's College London's Department of War Studies has been awarded funding to lead a major new project examining the impact of health disinformation on communities in the Canadian Arctic.

The study - 'Navigating Online Risks for Trusted Health Emergency Response in the North' (NORTHERN SHIELD) - is led by Dr Filippa Lentzos with Dr Gemma Bowsher and Dr Fawzia Gibson-Fall. The project has been awarded funding through the Supporting Impactful UK Arctic Science Engagement fund and will run from October 2025 to March 2026, including an extensive field trip to Arctic communities in February 2026.

Dr Filippa Lentzos explains the study's rationale:

Traditionally, disease outbreaks have generally been treated as purely a health issue. But in today's context, health and security are inseparable - from threats of biological warfare and sabotage to research accidents and disinformation campaigns."

These issues take on special urgency in the Arctic: a region particularly vulnerable to health disinformation due to dispersed populations, infrastructural limitations, and linguistic diversity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, false narratives about vaccines, virus origins, and treatments often intersected with long-standing mistrust of government and medical institutions, particularly among Indigenous communities historically subjected to exclusion and exploitation.

Moreover, the Arctic's rising geopolitical importance - as climate change opens new shipping routes and competition over natural resources intensifies - is raising the stakes of information influence campaigns.

Arctic health-security threats are often framed in terms of climate change and speculative future risks like prehistoric pathogens being released by melting ice. But the more immediate threat is disinformation - targeted narratives that exploit community vulnerabilities and geopolitical tensions. This is an area where research has been limited."

The information space becomes the battleground

There is growing evidence that foreign-state actors have weaponised health disinformation in the Arctic. These campaigns blend anti-vaccine rhetoric with Indigenous sovereignty, environmental concerns, and anti-Western narratives - undermining both public health interventions and democratic resilience.

The information space itself becomes the battleground. You don't need to tamper with biology directly to cause harm - simply manipulating narratives can generate real health consequences through fear, mistrust, and panic."

The King's team will provide one of the first systematic mappings of health-related disinformation in the Canadian Arctic.

Dr Lentzos explains: "What we're doing is collecting new empirical data on the Arctic: mapping the key narratives, identifying the actors pushing them, and examining their impacts on the communities on the ground."

Fieldwork will take place in Iqaluit (Nunavut), Kuujjuaq (Quebec) and Inuvik (Northwest Territories). The Research team will work with partners including the Nunavut Research Institute, the Kativik Regional Government, and Indigenous-led organisations, conducting interviews and participatory workshops with health professionals, Elders, youth, media representatives and emergency coordinators.

The aim is to co-develop culturally grounded, community-driven strategies to strengthen resilience to disinformation during pandemics and climate-related health disasters. Findings will feed into the Arctic Council's Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response (EPPR) framework, helping shape international approaches to health security.

This project is about generating evidence that can be transformed into actionable frameworks, tailored to unique Arctic communities but with lessons for other regions too across the world."

The project builds on King's established global leadership in disinformation research, particularly around weapons of mass destruction. It will extend that expertise into the Arctic - a new but increasingly strategic region.

The international team on the project also brings unique credibility. Dr Lentzos, an internationally recognised expert on biological threats and disinformation, is joined by Dr Bowsher, a medical doctor whose work bridges health and security, and Dr Gibson-Fall, a global health security scholar. Bowsher and Gibson-Fall hold dual UK-Canadian citizenship, while Lentzos is Norwegian - all with strong personal and cultural ties to Arctic states.

Bringing together diverse disciplines and international perspectives, the team embodies King's commitment to tackling global challenges at the nexus of health, security and society, and to producing research that supports communities on the ground.