The Multilingual Messengers of the Climate Crisis

“Less than 20% of all populations speak English, but around 90 to 98% of climate information is only available in English,” says Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa, who, at 23, is the first full-time executive director of Climate Cardinals. This global, youth-led organisation works to translate vital climate information into 100+ languages and empower non-English speakers to take environmental action.

Climate Cardinals, Hikaru explains, was founded in 2020 to help those who were getting left behind by an English-speaking climate movement.  “We realised that over 6.5 billion non-English speakers, as well as many other people speaking it as a second language, were being left out of conversations about their future.”

“Imagine how many Albert Einsteins there are in the world that we just don’t know about because their work, their ideas, their solutions, haven’t been shared in other languages.”

Sophia Kianna, an Iranian-American social entrepreneur and Climate Cardinals founder, realised the extent of the problem on a middle-school trip to her parents' home country of Iran. Sophia saw the once starry night sky now obscured by thick smog and learnt that the Middle East’s temperatures were rising by more than twice the global average. Yet, her Farsi-speaking relatives knew little of this - Sophia decided to personally translate climate documents so they could understand climate change.

“I could see in front of me how language barriers affected how much people knew about the climate crisis, and whether they were able to do anything about it,” Hikaru says.

Hikaru hears the world through at least six lenses – English, Spanish, Macedonian, Russian, Bulgarian and a little Japanese. Born to a Guyanese-American mother and a Japanese immigrant father (and growing up in the New York Metropolitan Area), he was aware of the multicultural social issues in his community.

“Two things that my parents taught me is that – everyone has a story. Then the second thing is – how can we leave the world a better place than when we first saw it?” As a child, Hikaru was endlessly curious, reading and writing fantasy, imagining better worlds and eager to learn more languages.

Witnessing local movements on racial justice, environmental problems, and the impact of Hurricane Sandy sparked his journey in advocacy. “That’s when I realised that I can imagine a better world, but I can also work to realise it with other people.”

In 2020, Sophia gathered friends and other passionate young people to create the Climate Cardinals online as a high school project. Hikaru became part of the founding team. “She was really focused on, 'How can we bring together people who care about this to make sure to shatter language barriers around the world?” he recalls.

Amidst the pandemic, almost explosively, their global youth movement came alive online through social media. They received over 8000 sign-ups from 60 countries within the year, along with partnerships with Translators Without Borders and UNICEF. Slowly, documents such as the IPCC climate reports, the UNDP climate glossary and climate emergency preparedness information were being translated by thousands of multilingual teenage students.

“Our generation is really amazing. We are used to all these systems, but we can see them and just realise, ‘Oh, you don’t have to do things this way.’”

“The average age of our volunteers when we began was 15, and now it's about 21, so everyone is very young, but they've been able to do it amazingly well, because they're determined.”

As a member of the founding team, Hikaru’s typical university days could mean a meeting with the UN for breakfast, classes on history, indigenous cultures and the environment, followed by late-night calls to brainstorm ideas. “We were doing all this between school, homework, friends and family, extracurriculars, and jobs.” He established the Climate Cardinals’ signature translation program.

Today, more than 16,000 youth have volunteered with Climate Cardinals to translate over 3 million words of climate information into 105+ languages for organisations including UNESCO and UNICEF. Their work has reached 11 million people across 134 countries, supporting thousands of youth in climate action.

“We also realised that the issue wasn't just accessing knowledge, but also that many communities do have their own knowledge and solutions where they can't scale them because they can't go to conferences to speak to partners or apply for grants.” As a solution, they started a Chapters program that empowers youth leaders to build climate resilience in their local communities.

In 2021, volunteers at their Kathmandu chapter went out to help their community clean up after devastating floods and sent back photos of their work. At the time, Hikaru was overwhelmed by memories of their humble beginnings as a ragtag group of high school students. “I just remember texting Sophia, and we’re like tearing up. This is crazy.”

“We've been able to build community with people halfway around the world who we've never met before, but who believe in something common.”

Nevertheless, this is just the beginning of the paradigm shift they plan in partnership with UN bodies to make language equity the norm. “You need to make your spaces accessible to other people, non-English speakers, or else you’re not truly representing or inviting the world into issues that affect them.”

The world that Hikaru imagines is one beyond barriers, where youth leaders raise their voices in a hundred different languages.

A global chorus of climate action.