The teen who decided climate science should speak every language
Climate Cardinals started with a few relatives in Iran and now runs one of the largest volunteer translation efforts in the climate movement.
Most of the world’s climate information is written in English. Most of the world is not. Sophia Kianni noticed the gap from the family side.
On a middle school trip to Iran she saw the pollution firsthand, then found that her relatives had almost nothing about climate change in Farsi. “I really took it upon myself to translate climate information to try to teach them about climate change,” she told Points of Light. The translating was the first project. The nonprofit came after.
Climate Cardinals launched in 2020, during lockdown, when Kianni started it with a group of high school friends. The pitch was simple: students translate climate material into other languages, and in return they earn community service hours. Per Points of Light, the first day brought more than 1,000 sign-ups, and the average volunteer was 16. A viral TikTok did a lot of the recruiting.
Early output was unglamorous and useful. Volunteers built climate glossaries, short definitions of climate terms, so that translators and the public were working from the same vocabulary. By October 2020 the group had translated more than 200,000 words into over 105 languages, and it had partnered with the UN Environment Programme to translate a youth manifesto for nature.
The group has not stayed a one-teen operation. Wikipedia’s entry, which leans partly on the organization’s own figures, puts it at more than 19,000 volunteers and 85 or more student-led chapters in over 20 countries, with 84 percent of those chapters in the Global South. It is a fiscally sponsored project, and Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa, an early volunteer, became full-time executive director in September 2024. Kianni herself has sat on the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change.
The model is the interesting part. Translation is a task a 16-year-old in Lagos or Lahore can do from a phone, in a language no English-speaking program officer can fake. Climate Cardinals treats bilingual students as infrastructure, which is roughly what they are.
The goal has not changed: a climate fact should not need a visa. If you read two languages and have an afternoon, the group’s website takes volunteers.
