28 Facts About Sophia Kianni

Sophia Kianni was born on December 13,2001 and is an American social entrepreneur and climate activist.

Sophia Kianni is the founder and president of Climate Cardinals, a nonprofit offering climate change information in multiple languages, serves on the EPA's National Youth Advisory Council, and as an advisor to the United Nations.

Sophia Kianni is the youngest United Nations advisor in US history.

Sophia Kianni helped organize the 2019 Black Friday climate strike.

In November 2019, Sophia Kianni skipped school to join a group of protesters organized by Extinction Rebellion who intended to stage a week-long hunger strike and sit-in at the Washington, DC, office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, demanding that she speak with them for an hour on camera about climate change.

Locally, there were roughly a dozen participants; at 17 years old, Sophia Kianni was the youngest, and one of two women.

Sophia Kianni was not a member of XR, and only participated in the first day of the sit-in, but gave a prepared speech and interviews to the press, and continued the hunger strike remotely.

Sophia Kianni wrote about her participation in the protest for Teen Vogue, and in 2020 acted as an XR DC spokesperson.

Sophia Kianni was able to continue her activism remotely with her talk at Michigan Technological University.

In July 2020, Sophia Kianni was named by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to his new Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change, a group of seven young climate leaders to advise him on action for the climate crisis.

Sophia Kianni was the youngest in the group, which ranged from 18 to 28 years old.

Sophia Kianni was the only one representing the United States, and the only one representing the Middle East and Iran.

In September 2021, Sophia Kianni was one of 4 co-chairs of the Youth4Climate event in Milan, preliminary to the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP26.

At COP26 itself, in November 2021 in Glasgow, Sophia Kianni spoke at several panels, and met with Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations.

In October 2022, Sophia Kianni was covered by Vogue Arabia for representing the UN and speaking at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

At COP28, Sophia Kianni announced her We Wear Oil campaign, designed to draw attention to the contribution of fossil fuels used in fashion to the climate crisis.

Sophia Kianni wrote a 2019 article for Teen Vogue about the Pelosi office hunger strike.

Sophia Kianni wrote an article for MTV News for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, which she helped coordinate, and another in 2022 for The Washington Post about how she lives sustainably in college.

In 2021, Sophia Kianni began hosting a podcast for The New Fashion Initiative, interviewing experts involved in the fashion industry about addressing climate change.

Sophia Kianni has spoken at several conferences around the world, including Web Summit, the 2022 Arch Summit, Washington Post Live, BBYO Insider, Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, New York Times Events' Climate Hub, and TED Countdown.

Sophia Kianni was inspired by the years she spent translating English-language climate change articles into Persian for her Iranian relatives, as Iranian media barely covered the subject.

Sophia Kianni says she noticed informational content about climate change is either available only in English, or at best in Chinese and Spanish, making them inaccessible to speakers of other languages.

In 2023, Climate Cardinals partnered with the Google Cloud AI-powered Translation Hub to translate 800,000 words into 40 languages, which Sophia Kianni says is as much output in three months as in the previous two years.

In December 2020, Sophia Kianni was named one of Vice magazine's Motherboard 20 Humans of 2020, for being the US representative for United Nations Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change and starting Climate Cardinals.

In December 2021, Sophia Kianni was named one of Teen Vogue's "21 under 21" for her climate activism.

In November 2023, Sophia Kianni was named to the BBC's 100 Women list.

Sophia Kianni studied at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Middle School, where her team won the statewide Science Olympiad, and at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

Sophia Kianni received extensive media attention as an example of a teenager reacting to the social distancing measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.