Climate activist, Founder of Climate Cardinals, the youngest UN advisor, listed in the BBC’s 100 Women and Forbes 30 under 30: Sophia Kianni has quite the bio! As a storyteller who has spoken across the globe, she is using her voice to lead the way in the fight against climate change.
Where It All Began
Sophia, an Iranian-American, was in middle school when she witnessed the disastrous impact climate change was having on Iran. However, she quickly came to the scary realisation that people across many parts of the globe, Iran included, were not getting access to the latest climate news, statistics and reports and were being left in the dark about matters that were happening in their own countries, impacting their daily lives and futures.
“With widespread droughts and heat waves – I was shocked to find my relatives were unaware of the rapid and alarming global warming impacting the Middle East, where temperatures are rising more than twice the global average. Determined to educate my family, I translated climate science articles into Farsi.”
This was a global issue that Sophia had witnessed from her family and other climate education organisations she was volunteering with at the time. There was a shocking lack of translation programs for climate change information and she wanted to make sure that it was addressed.
“So, I founded Climate Cardinals – the first organization working to make climate education more accessible to people who don’t speak English.”
Climate Cardinals
Climate Cardinals is an international youth-led nonprofit working to make the climate movement more accessible to those who don’t speak English. They are working to educate and empower people to tackle the climate crisis.
“As the founder of Climate Cardinals, I have demonstrated a deep commitment to making environmental education more accessible to people around the world to catalyse climate action. Now that we have grown, our mission has evolved beyond translations, and we now envision a world where everyone can become a Climate Cardinal – messengers sounding the alarm on our world’s greatest threat.”
Some of Sophia’s most notable partnerships have included: working with the UNEP to translate their Youth #ForNature initiative into dozens of languages, creating the most widely distributed petition on planetary health; partnering with the Italian Government to translate the COP26 Youth4Climate manifesto into the UN Languages; collaborating with UNICEF to translate their Children’s Climate Risk Index Report into multiple Indigenous and African Languages.
Global Achievements
Sophia’s work speaks for itself. The great effort that she had put into helping people across the globe is incredible. It was wonderful to hear the statistics to truly put it in to perspective!
“In the last 4 years, Climate Cardinals has grown to a volunteer base of 13,000+ people across 80 countries, operated by full-time and part-time staff of 15 directors and 100 team members. We partnered with Google to employ their new AI and machine learning-assisted translation tools to translate over 500,000 words of essential climate resources into 40+ languages for partners like the Yale Center for Climate Communications and United Nations Environmental Programme.”
Sophia spoke about her role as the executive director and her plans for the coming year:
“As Executive Director, I have fundraised grants from groups like Twitter, Loreal, and National Geographic and expanded our capacity to translate 1.5 million words of crucial climate resources into 100+ languages. We are using our new funding to hire full-time staff, including our chief operator, and will be launching our ambassador program with an NGO partner and our chapter program with a technology partner, all this year.”
On top fo all of her work for Climate Cardinals, Sophia’s has also spent her time working as a UN advisor. At 18, Sophia was appointed by the head of the United Nations to represent the US as the youngest member of the inaugural UN Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change. She served for over 2 years in this role, where she attended meetings with senior UN officers and country ambassadors to exchange ideas on how the UN could drive global climate ambition and action. She also worked with the UN Foundation to host a US consultation to establish key environmental priorities that American youth wanted to communicate to educate the nation on the urgency of the climate crisis. Following this, she was appointed by the United Nations-Association as their first Advisor.
“In my role as Advisor, I provide strategic guidance and organize, promote, and host events and consultations to educate the public about the SDGs and the role they can play through UNA-USA.”
Sophia Kianni has contributed a lot to the fight against climate change. What started as Sophia wanting to help and educate her family has ended up with her educating thousands of people around the world.
