Sustainable solutions to the climate crisis can’t be designed from the top down. They will come from communities, from the people living on the frontlines of rising seas, failing harvests, and extreme heat. But a global crisis demands a truly global conversation, and right now that conversation is being held in a language most of the world does not speak. The communities with the most at stake are too often the least informed, not because the knowledge doesn’t exist, but because it was never made accessible to them. Since 2020, Climate Cardinals and CLEAR Global have been working to change that, together translating more than 1.6 million words of climate content into 66 language variants.
A crisis within the crisis
Climate Cardinals was founded after its founder, Sophia Kianni, visited family in Iran and witnessed thick smog over Tehran. What struck her most was not just the pollution itself but the fact that her relatives had almost no access to reliable climate information, simply because it wasn’t available in Farsi. That personal experience illuminated a systemic problem: the communities most exposed to climate impacts are often the least equipped with the knowledge to respond, because the information exists almost exclusively in English.
The scale of the problem is hard to overstate. According to Climate Cardinals’ recently launched global framework, 98% of scientific publications are in English, a figure that staggers even seasoned policymakers. As Carl Philip Dybwad, Chief Operating Officer explains, “translation is treated as an afterthought rather than core infrastructure. There’s an assumption that if research is important, it will naturally reach everyone who needs it, but in reality, most climate information never gets translated at all, especially into low-resource and Indigenous languages.”
Why language access is a resilience issue
It would be easy to frame this as a communications problem, a matter of reaching wider audiences. But Climate Cardinals is firm that the stakes are much higher than that. If communities cannot access evacuation guidance, adaptation strategies, or climate education in a language they understand, their ability to prepare for and respond to climate threats is directly compromised. Language access shapes who gets to participate, lead, and survive.
This is the argument at the heart of Climate Cardinals’ global framework, which makes the case in striking terms: “Language is climate infrastructure. Treat it like levees and satellites: plan it, fund it, test it, and report on it. By institutionalizing multilingual inclusion through standards […], financing[…], and mandated multilingual warnings, governments and partners can convert climate knowledge into climate action for everyone, not just the already included.”
What actually works
The collaboration between Climate Cardinals and CLEAR Global reflects hard-won lessons about what effective multilingual climate communication requires. Early experiments with fully automated AI translation revealed clear limitations, particularly for climate terminology and low-resource languages, where literal translations can miss cultural nuance or even create dangerous confusion in emergency contexts. The approach that works is a hybrid one: technology accelerates the process, but community translators ensure contextual accuracy and local trust.
That question of trust turns out to be central. “People are far more likely to engage with information when it comes from someone in their own community who understands local culture, dialects, and realities,” Dybwad notes. Youth-led translation networks have proven especially effective, with young people bridging digital platforms and community spaces simultaneously.
Highly centralized communication strategies, by contrast, tend to underperform. Locally adapted approaches, led by people with genuine ties to the communities they serve, consistently outperform top-down models.
A shared vision for language inclusion
When Climate Cardinals set out to find a translation partner, the requirements went beyond technical capability. The team wanted an organization that understood translation not simply as a linguistic exercise but as an act of trust-building and inclusion, one with experience in humanitarian and frontline contexts where accuracy can carry real-world consequences. CLEAR Global, with decades of expertise in language services for the social impact sector, fit that brief.
The result is a partnership that brings together complementary strengths: CLEAR Global’s language expertise alongside Climate Cardinals’ global network of young multilingual volunteers and its deep roots in grassroots climate engagement. Together, we have scaled a model that treats multilingual access not as a nice-to-have but as foundational to climate action itself.
A call to policymakers
The 1.6 million words translated since 2020 represent real progress. But the ambition behind this work is larger: a world in which climate negotiators stop treating language access as a side consideration and begin budgeting for it from the start, funding translation, interpretation, and localized communications as core components of climate policy rather than optional add-ons.
The next time a climate negotiation convenes, the question worth asking is whose voices are absent because of language barriers, and what it would take to include them. The tools, the models, and the partnerships to answer that question already exist.