Climate change is a global problem that speaks mostly one language. The scientific literature is overwhelmingly in English. The international negotiations happen predominantly in English. The major climate activist networks were built in English-speaking countries and communicate primarily in English. The philanthropic funding that supports climate action flows from English-speaking foundations with English-language application processes.
Meanwhile, the communities most affected by climate change — small island nations, subsistence farming communities in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, Arctic Indigenous communities, coastal populations in Southeast Asia — often speak languages with limited digital presence, limited scientific infrastructure, and limited access to the information that would help them understand what is happening to their world and how to respond.
This is not simply a translation problem. It is a structural problem that makes language access central to climate justice.
The English Dominance of Climate Science
of peer-reviewed climate science is published in English — inaccessible to researchers and policymakers in the majority of the world without translation or English proficiency. (Nature Climate Change, 2023)
UN official languages in which IPCC reports are available — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish — covering fewer than half the world's people and none of the 7,000+ languages in which climate-vulnerable communities communicate. (IPCC, 2023)
languages identified in Papua New Guinea — one of the world's most linguistically diverse nations, also one of the most climate-vulnerable. There is no comprehensive climate communication infrastructure in any of these languages. (Ethnologue, 2024)
of world's climate-vulnerable populations live in countries where English is not an official language and where English proficiency rates among the general population are below 20%. (ND-GAIN Country Index, 2023)
The IPCC Gap
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produces the world's most authoritative summaries of climate science — the documents that governments and policymakers use to set targets, design policies, and justify climate action or inaction. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, published between 2021 and 2022, runs to thousands of pages across its three working group reports.
The IPCC Secretariat translates its Summary for Policymakers documents into all six UN official languages. The full technical reports are available in English only. The Summary for Policymakers is approximately 40 pages out of a total report that, for Working Group I alone, exceeds 3,900 pages.
Beyond the official UN languages, no formal IPCC translation infrastructure exists. Volunteer translation efforts have produced partial translations of summaries in additional languages — Japanese, Portuguese, German, Korean — but these are incomplete and inconsistently updated. For the vast majority of the world's 7,000+ languages, no official IPCC content exists at all.
This matters because the IPCC's findings are the factual basis for national climate policy. Countries that cannot access the primary scientific literature in their own language — either because their policymakers do not read English or because English-language content is inaccessible to the public that must understand and support climate policies — are at a structural disadvantage in both developing and implementing climate action.
COP and the Negotiating Disadvantage
The annual UN Climate Change Conferences — COP, short for Conference of the Parties — are the central venue for international climate diplomacy. Held in a different country each year (COP26 in Glasgow, COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, COP28 in Dubai, COP29 in Baku), they bring together tens of thousands of delegates, civil society observers, and journalists to negotiate the rules and commitments that govern global climate action.
Official UN interpretation is provided for all six UN languages in formal plenary sessions. In the informal consultations, contact groups, and bilateral conversations where the substantive negotiations actually happen, English dominates. The specific, technical language of climate diplomacy — carbon markets, nationally determined contributions, loss and damage, common but differentiated responsibilities — is a specialized English vocabulary that negotiators must master to participate effectively.
Research by Climate Analytics and the International Institute for Environment and Development has documented a systematic pattern: delegations from high-income, English-speaking countries consistently achieve better outcomes in ambiguous textual negotiations than delegations from low-income, non-English-speaking countries. The mechanism is straightforward — negotiating in your second or third language at 2am after a 16-hour session, when the text is being finalized, puts you at a measurable disadvantage relative to native English speakers.
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) — nations like Tuvalu, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Vanuatu, and the Maldives, which face existential threat from sea level rise — provide the starkest example. These nations send delegations of a handful of negotiators to COP. They must cover dozens of negotiating tracks simultaneously, in English, against large delegations from major emitters who have specialist negotiators for each track. The David-vs-Goliath dynamic is bad enough in terms of human resources; the language disadvantage compounds it.
Indigenous Languages and Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Indigenous communities around the world possess what researchers call Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) — accumulated observations about local ecosystems, seasonal patterns, species behavior, and land management practices developed over centuries or millennia. This knowledge is directly relevant to climate science: Indigenous observers have documented changes in migration patterns, ice formation, plant flowering, and weather patterns that provide long-term baselines that instrumental records cannot.
The problem is that this knowledge exists primarily in oral traditions and in languages that are often endangered, insufficiently documented, and without the conceptual vocabulary to interface easily with Western scientific frameworks.
A Yup'ik elder in Alaska observing changes in sea ice thickness has observations that are directly relevant to Arctic climate science — but the conceptual framework through which those observations are held, the Yup'ik language's specific vocabulary for ice conditions (which has hundreds of distinct terms for different ice states), and the relational context that gives those observations meaning cannot be captured by simple translation into English.
The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, for the first time, made a systematic attempt to incorporate Indigenous and local knowledge alongside scientific evidence. The effort was significant and well-intentioned. But climate researchers who participated in the process have written about the challenges: the translation of Indigenous knowledge into scientific evidence categories often stripped away precisely the contextual and relational dimensions that made the knowledge powerful.
Indigenous climate advocates have argued that the problem is not primarily one of translation — it is one of epistemology. The question is not just "how do we say this in English" but "how do we preserve the meaning when that meaning is inseparable from the language in which it was formed."
Climate Disinformation Across Languages
One of the most underreported dimensions of language barriers in climate action is the asymmetry in climate disinformation. Organized climate disinformation — the coordinated effort to cast doubt on climate science, delay policy action, and undermine climate activists — was primarily developed in English and targets English-speaking audiences. But it has spread effectively across languages, often without the counter-infrastructure of fact-checking and scientific communication that exists in English.
Research by Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) has documented that climate misinformation spreads across social media in languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, and Indonesian at rates that outpace the scientific counter-messaging available in those languages. A disinformation narrative seeded in English reaches Spanish-language audiences through translation (often poor but functional enough to spread), while the scientific rebuttal that exists in English may not have been translated at all.
This creates a specific vulnerability in countries experiencing rapid social media adoption — primarily middle-income developing countries where climate policy decisions will be critically important in the coming decades — where the information environment around climate is shaped more by disinformation than by science, partly because the science is not accessible in local languages.
Climate Emergency Communication
Beyond the policy and advocacy dimensions, there is an immediate and practical language dimension to climate emergency communication. Extreme weather events — tropical cyclones, floods, wildfires, heatwaves — require rapid public communication in languages that affected communities actually understand.
Emergency alerts in many countries are issued in national official languages that may not be the primary languages of the most vulnerable populations. In the Philippines, official emergency communications are in Filipino and English — but significant populations speak regional languages (Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Waray) as their primary language. In India, official disaster management communications operate in Hindi and English — while the communities most vulnerable to floods and cyclones in states like Odisha, West Bengal, and Assam may be more comfortable in Odia, Bengali, or local tribal languages.
Research on disaster mortality consistently finds that language barriers are a significant factor in evacuation failures. Communities that do not receive emergency warnings in their own language have lower rates of compliance with evacuation orders — not because of disregard but because of non-comprehension.
The Climate Finance Gap
Climate finance — the flow of money from wealthy countries and institutions to developing countries for climate mitigation and adaptation — is one of the central contested issues in international climate diplomacy. The $100 billion per year promise made at COP15 in 2009 has never been fully met; the actual needs are estimated at trillions annually.
Getting climate finance to the communities that need it involves navigating a complex institutional landscape dominated by English-language processes. The Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund, the Global Environment Facility — these institutions have proposal processes, compliance requirements, and reporting frameworks developed in English. Small countries and local civil society organizations that want to access this funding must hire specialized technical writers who can navigate the English-language bureaucratic requirements.
This creates a systematic bias: organizations with English-language capacity — typically those in capital cities, with international connections, often not the most locally embedded — are better positioned to access climate finance than community organizations doing the most direct adaptation work in the most affected places.
Climate finance advocates have documented the "transaction cost" of accessing multilateral climate funds for small island states and least-developed countries — the cost in time, expertise, and bureaucratic capacity of preparing a successful funding application. Language barrier is a significant and underacknowledged component of that transaction cost.
What Better Language Access Would Change
The climate language problem is not primarily a technology problem — it is a power and priority problem. The resources exist to translate the IPCC reports more comprehensively. The will to provide adequate interpretation at COP side events exists; it is a budget and priority question. The capacity to develop climate communication materials in local languages exists; it requires investment.
But technology can accelerate progress in ways that matter at the margin. Better real-time translation allows climate advocates from non-English-speaking countries to participate more effectively in international forums. Translation of scientific communication into more languages — made cheaper and faster by improved machine translation, with human review for accuracy — could expand access to climate science significantly. Real-time multilingual communication tools allow climate networks to include voices from climate-frontline communities who have never participated because language barriers excluded them.
The communities that will be most affected by climate change in the coming decades — in the Sahel, in South and Southeast Asia, in Pacific island nations, in Arctic Indigenous territories — communicate in languages that the current English-centric climate infrastructure systematically excludes. Making climate action genuinely global requires making the conversation genuinely multilingual.
That is not only a matter of fairness. It is a matter of effectiveness. The communities that have watched ecosystems change for generations hold knowledge that climate science needs. The political will required for adequate climate action must be built in Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic, Swahili, Indonesian, Portuguese, and thousands of other languages. The solutions that will actually work in communities will be co-designed by people who speak those languages and understand those contexts.
The planet cannot wait for a translation that never comes.
HeyBabel is building real-time translation for messaging — so climate advocates, researchers, and affected communities can collaborate across every language. Join the waitlist.