Sophia Kianni recounts witnessing severe air pollution in Iran and discovering widespread lack of climate literacy in non-English-speaking communities. She cites studies showing low awareness and the dominance of English in scientific publishing, argues this language gap fuels misinformation and low engagement, and presents Climate Cardinals, her youth-led nonprofit that mobilizes thousands of bilingual volunteers to translate climate resources into over 100 languages. She closes with a call to broaden access to climate information so all communities can take action.
Chapters
At just 12 years old, I witnessed the devastating impact pollution was having on Iran, my parents home country. On one of my summer visits, I witnessed smog so heavy it completely blanketed the air, obscuring the stars I wanted to trace out of the night sky. I decided to read more about climate change in Iran and I became increasingly alarmed, particularly when I learned the fact that temperatures in the Middle east were rising more than twice the global average.
Armed with this knowledge, I decided to confront my relatives. But I was shocked when they informed me that they knew almost nothing about climate change.
So I began to dig into the lack of climate education in Iran and I found a study that read only 5% of Iranian students could properly explain the greenhouse gas effect.
As I continued to scour the Internet for more information, I began to connect the dots.
From what I could see, there was a severe lack of climate resources available in Farsi, Iran's native language.
Now, I was still determined to educate my relatives. So I decided to work with my mom to translate climate resources into Farsi so I could teach my aunts and uncles about how climate change induced disasters were impacting millions of Iranians.
As I watched my relatives read my translations, I had never been happier to see fear plastered all over their faces because reading my translations had succeeded in convincing them that climate change was a real and pressing threat.
Now, my story is anecdotal.
But the fact that the vast majority of scientific research is only available in English is a big problem when it comes to climate change.
Because most people in the world don't speak English. In fact, 75% of them do not speak English at all.
Yet According to a 2012 study on Scopus, the world's largest database for peer reviewed journals, 80% of articles are written entirely in English.
Even the United Nations IPCC report, widely regarded as one of the most renowned pieces of climate literature in the world, is only officially available in the six UN languages.
Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. But these are languages that account for less than half of the world's speaking population.
Meaning the majority of people on our planet are unable to understand the documents and agreements being issued by the world's highest international political body.
This lack of easily accessible documents and resources leads to misinformation and low public interest around tackling issues such as climate change.
In fact, just six years ago, 40% of adults in the world had never heard of climate change.
Let me repeat that. Two out of five adults had never heard of climate change.
When looking at specific regions where this problem lies, we can see that Multiple studies had found in Africa, there was a severe lack of climate education and curriculum available in Africa's indigenous and local languages.
This lack of information only hurts those who need access to it the most.
In countries such as Japan and the Philippines, climate change has worsened typhoons and disrupted agricultural industries. In these and the other 10 countries worst impacted by climate change, only one, Canada, is a majority. English speaking languages remain a significant barrier to the global transfer of scientific knowledge, be it through the press, through schools or through political processes.
In an effort to close the climate translation gap, I decided to start Climate Cardinals, an international youth led nonprofit working to make climate education more accessible to those who don't speak English. We work with over 8,000 bilingual student volunteers who are who translate climate information in exchange for community service hours. In just over a year, we've translated hundreds of thousands of words of climate information into over 100 languages, including Yerba, Somali, Swahili and Gujarati.
If a ragtag group of teenagers that congregate through social media can do this work, imagine the impact that a concentrated effort by governments, scientists and policymakers would have.
Groups of people that are being disproportionately affected by climate change deserve to have access to the resources they need to make sense of these disasters that are destroying their communities.
The more people are informed about the climate crisis, the greater chance we have to coordinate collective efforts in protection of the future of our planet. Because every single person in the world, every single person in this room, has the power to further climate action. So we must engage people from every country, young and old, to join the fight for climate justice.
English cannot be the barrier to entry. Thank you.
