Sophia Kianni Is Spreading the Word on Climate Change, 100 Ways

At 21, Sophia Kianni has already packed in more experiences than many people have in a lifetime, all with a singular goal: to help educate people around the world about climate change.

The heart of her work is Climate Cardinals, a nonprofit she founded when she was just 17 that aims to make information and research about climate change more accessible to people who don't speak English. That work led directly to her appointment in 2020 as a United Nations advisor on climate change—she's the youngest UN advisor in U.S. history—and this year to her selection for the steering committee of UNESCO's youth-led climate group, YoU-CAN. She's marched alongside Jane Fonda at a climate event she organized in Washington, given a TED talk (2.3 million views so far) and spoken about climate change at universities from Harvard to Cambridge. And somehow, she also manages to be a regular college student herself: She's about to start her senior year at Stanford University, in the Science, Technology, and Society program.

Taking a class on the changing eco landscape as a sixth grader in Maclean, Virginia, first sparked Kianni's interest in climate change, but she was really galvanized to take action during the summers she spent in Iran, her parents' native country. In the Middle East, she learned, people were being hospitalized daily because of toxic air pollution, and temperatures were rising more than twice the global average. During one trip to Tehran, she realized she could no longer see the stars because heavy smog from pollution was blocking them.

When she spoke to her Iranian relatives about what was happening, though, she found that climate change wasn't part of their conversation. "There weren't really any climate resources available in Farsi, their native language," she says. That led to a lack of understanding about the causes and dangers of global warming. One study she read showed that only 5 percent of Iranian students understood the greenhouse gas effect. And the problem went far beyond the region: While 75 percent of the world doesn't speak English, 80 percent of all climate change articles are written in that language.

The net effect, Kianni says, is that even as a global movement was building to address climate change, "We were leaving people like my relatives behind."

In middle school, she began translating articles into Farsi herself, so her family could read them. By high school, she decided to launch a formal organization to translate climate research into other languages: Climate Cardinals, named for Virginia's state bird and to symbolize information flying around the world. Recruiting young volunteers initially via TikTok and later across other social media platforms, the nonprofit quickly took off; at last count, some 10,000 teenage volunteers from more than 70 countries are involved, who have collectively translated climate change materials into 100 languages. A partnership this year with Google gave Climate Cardinals access to an AI-driven translation tool, which has enabled the organization to add another 40 languages to its roster, including Hausa (spoken mainly in West Africa), Latvian and Maithili (spoken in parts of India and Nepal). The group has also partnered with Translators without Borders to review the translations to ensure accuracy.

"I believe in the power of climate education." Kianni says. "How can you help stop a crisis that you don't even know is happening?"

Despite the many accolades that have come her way, Kianni has also faced criticism for personal choices; on Instagram, some critics point fingers at her frequent air travel and new clothes. To Kianni, assigning individual blame for climate change and the subsequent guilt people feel is one of the biggest impediments to taking action. "People reach out to me and say, 'I don't feel like I can talk about climate change, because I'm not vegan, or whatever," Kianni says. But, she points out, it won't take one person going vegan or even a community taking on a recycling initiative to effect change; it will take a movement of regular people holding the world's biggest polluters accountable.

Though the urgency of the climate movement takes up the better part of Kianni's days, she also makes time to spend with friends and be a normal college student. It just takes prioritizing and setting hard stop times with work, she says. She loves rap music and going to concerts (her favorite was Drake's Aubrey and the Three Migos show, where she and her sister snuck into the mosh pit). "I'm only going to be 21 once in my life," she says.

Next up for her is the 776 Fellowship, a program started by Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian that gives $100,000 grants to young people focused on solving climate change. But even with the excitement of new ventures, it's the Climate Cardinals community that keeps Kianni going. In the group's most recent call for executive team members, more than 5,000 people showed interest in applying; the application post went viral on TikTok, reaching over a million people. "And these were all students," Kianni says. "They just want to be part of something. They want to be working towards a better world."