Sophia Kianni has just celebrated her 20th birthday, she was appointed in 2020 with six other young people to advise Antonio Guterres on climate issues. And if we are talking about her today, it is because in this week when the last part of the IPCC report has just been published, it is also her work that is highlighted, work on words, to convince. A student at Stanford, the American-Iranian Sophia Kianni, in her 20s, has been interested in the climate for years, precisely in the question of knowing how to act, and she defends the idea that “anyone can become a climate activist“.
Young people are leading the way in the fight against the climate crisis – with their ideas, voices & actions.
I’m grateful to my Youth Advisory Group on Climate for an open discussion on how the @A can better integrate the needs & goals of youth in all our #ClimateAction work. pic.twitter.com/j9MQBeLwzp
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) March 30, 2022
She is not afraid of the expression, she repeats it at will, and she even convinced the UN Secretary General to take it up on her own, when he said on Tuesday during the presentation of the IPCC report, that “climate activists are sometimes portrayed as dangerously radicalized, but the real dangerous radicalized are the countries that are increasing their fossil fuel production“Words matter, and it is this battle that Sophia Kianni wants to win. Her activism is to popularize scientific information, to make it accessible to as many people as possible, since that is not the case everywhere .
That’s what she realized at age 12, when her parents took her to Iran, their country of origin, to visit her family in Tehran. “When I arrived, I was shocked by the level of pollution, I understood that in the East, the climate crisis was even more marked than in the United States, but when I spoke to my uncles, my aunts, my grandmother of pollution, they made me understand that they didn’t know much about it, the same about climate change, that’s when I said to myself that everyone had the right to know, and I had the idea of creating a network of translators“.
Sophia Kianni launched Climate Cardinals in 2020, to translate studies on greenhouse gases, food, water, waste into all languages, today 8000 volunteers work in a hundred dialects, from Creole Haitian to Indonesian via Iranian Farsi.
A success that earned him the honors of Forbes, Time and CNN at the age of 18. Sophia Kianni, who on the UN website sends a very specific message to young people around the world: “Go vote, if you want things to change, since change goes through laws and the governments that make them, go vote.”