Climate science locked behind English leaves billions in the dark

In July 2023, wildfires forced 19,000 people to evacuate Yellowknife, the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories. Emergency alerts arrived in French and English. But the nine Indigenous languages officially recognized in the territory got nothing. Some families learned about the danger from friends, radio static, and social media posts instead of official warnings.

This wasn't an oversight. It was a symptom of something much larger.

The Language Barrier

Climate information—from evacuation orders to peer-reviewed research—flows almost entirely in English. A new report from Climate Cardinals, a youth-led advocacy group focused on language access, found that 80% of scientific papers are published in English, a language spoken by just 18% of the world's population. That means the vast majority of people on Earth are locked out of the research that explains how their climate is changing.

The consequences ripple outward. When Indigenous communities in the Arctic can't access climate science in their own languages, they can't participate in the decisions that affect them. When governments in Southeast Asia can't read the latest research on typhoon patterns, they can't plan accordingly. When policy makers in Lagos or Lima don't hear from the people most affected by climate change—because the information never reaches them in a language they understand—the solutions that get funded reflect a narrow slice of human experience.

"Language is not just about inclusion," said Jackie Vandermel, research co-director at Climate Cardinals. "Language determines what would count as climate reality. It determines who gets heard in climate governance."

Indigenous languages carry something English-language climate science often misses: detailed, accumulated knowledge of local ecosystems and weather patterns built over centuries. That knowledge could be critical to understanding and adapting to climate change. But it's being lost. Climate change itself accelerates language extinction—forced migration severs ties to ancestral lands, making it harder to pass languages to the next generation. Indigenous peoples face the highest climate risks and the least access to information about those risks, all while their languages—which could help everyone respond better—disappear.

Who Decides What Matters

This shapes which problems get solved and which get ignored. News organizations, research institutions, and governments decide whose voices get translated, in what format, and to whom. Those choices determine what climates realities become visible to the systems that fund responses and set policy.

Climate Cardinals is calling for a global climate language access fund—a dedicated pool of money to translate scientific research, government reports, international climate negotiations, and extreme weather alerts into languages spoken by billions of people. To their knowledge, the United Nations has never seriously considered it, though some U.N. agencies are beginning to explore machine translation as a partial solution.

Funding remains the hard part. Governments have consistently fallen short on climate finance commitments. The U.S. has slashed funding for non-English weather warnings, despite evidence that such cuts cost lives. In a time of tight budgets and competing priorities, a language access fund might seem like a nice-to-have.

But Laura Martin, an environmental studies professor at Williams College, frames it differently: "The hiring of translators, multilingual educators, and local reporters should be embedded in policy and financial structures. Language is a matter of climate justice."

The Yellowknife evacuation happened because people acted quickly and communities helped each other. But that shouldn't be the fallback. Climate information that reaches people in the languages they speak isn't a luxury—it's the difference between understanding what's coming and being left to figure it out alone.