Please Go Away Travel Podcast
Please Go Away Travel Podcast
Reigniting The Please Go Away Podcast with Climate Change Advocacy: A Guided Journey with Sophia Kianni
Ever wonder how a young girl's realization of the drastic climate change effects in her native Iran sparked a global movement? Our guest for today is none other than Sophia Kianni, the world's youngest United Nations advisor. Sophia takes us on an inspiring journey from her eye-opening visit to Iran at the age of 12 which led her to recognizing the dire need for climate education. She talks about her impactful work as the founder and executive director of Climate Cardinals, a youth-led climate nonprofit translating climate resources into multiple languages.
Prepare to be inspired as Accor Hotels Thought Leadership Breakfast Speaker, Sophia Kianni, shares the power of youth in initiating significant change. She elaborates on the transformative power her initial steps to educate her family about climate change issues had on her journey, leading to her founding Climate Cardinals. Sophia not only discusses her work with the United Nations but also her partnership with Google to leverage their AI technologies in her pursuit of worldwide climate education. Listen in, as we explore climate change, sustainability, and the undeniably powerful role of youth in this episode.
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Please Go Away Travel Podcast. I'm your hostess, Amanda Klimak, and I'm here to talk to you about all things in living your personal wander list. It's been over two years since we've launched a podcast and I'm thrilled to be once again launching our podcast from Virtuoso Travel Week in Las Vegas, N evada. Now most people will ask me why would you go to Las Vegas in August? Well, this travel show is actually the mecca for thousands of top luxury travel professionals and providers from around the world. There are people here from over 100 countries and our travel specialists have one-on-one appointments, professional development opportunities and both formal and informal meetings and exchanges. Our business is all about connections, making friends, so that when we send our travelers around the world, I'm not just booking another client, I'm having one of my friends receive my clients to their country, their hotel, their destination and on their trip. So my team is here exploring the world, making connections, rebuilding relationships after a really tough couple of years, and we've got lots of exciting things to share.
Amanda Klimak:This morning. I started my day with the Accor Hotels Thought Leadership Breakfast. Now, accor Hotels may not be a brand you're necessarily familiar with off hand, but they own chains like Raffles, oriental Express, sofa, tell and Fairmont Hotels, just to name a few, and they have a real focus on sustainability. As a corporation, their goal is to be net zero by 2050. They've eliminated single use plastics in over 84% of their hotels and this morning they invited a speaker, an Iranian American social entrepreneur and activist studying at Stanford University. She is the founder and executive director of Climate Cardinals, the world's largest youth led climate non-profit, with over 10,000 volunteers in 80 plus countries around the world. She is the youngest United Nations advisor in US history. Her name is Sophia Keani and I'm so excited to share a recording of her talk this morning about climate.
Sophia Kianni:Sometimes, hearing my introduction, I have to remember all the things I have done. But hi everyone, I'm Sophia Keane and I'm so honored to be here today and really also to celebrate everything that my incredible uncle has done to move the hospitality industry forward.
Sophia Kianni:I want to give some context and insight into my background and the work that I've done in the last few years to really drive forward climate action, and to speak personally to why climate action is so important to young people like me.
Sophia Kianni:And so my story really started when I was just 12 years old.
Sophia Kianni:Both of my parents are from Iran and growing up I would visit Iran almost every single summer and I would go to my grandmother's house, and I'm originally from the Washington DC area and I remember right after my sixth grade class about climate change.
Sophia Kianni:I went on my last trip to Iran and, with the context of my climate education, it was shocking to me how awful the circumstances in Iran were. I was struck by the fact that I learned that temperatures in the Middle East were rising more than twice the global average and the air pollution in Iran was so bad that I couldn't even see the stars at night. And I later found out that in Iran, thousands of people are being hospitalized every single day because of how poor the air quality is, and I began to talk about this issue with my relatives, using these buzzwords I confirmed in school, like carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, and it was shocking to me that my relatives really greeted me with blank stairs and they had very little understanding about the state of the climate crisis and the research, and so I wanted to understand why this was, and I found a study that read only 5% of Iranian students could properly explain the greenhouse gas effect, because there was actually a systemic lack of climate literature available in Farsi, which is Iran's native language.
Sophia Kianni:And although my experience may be anecdotal the reality is that just a few years ago, 40% of adults in the world had never heard of climate change, so we are still making enormous progress towards ensuring that the global public is educated about the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to take immediate action, and so this experience for me as a young girl in middle school, was incredibly transformational, particularly because it showed me that there was an opportunity to actually make a difference and not just be paralyzed in this fear that I was being forced with this crisis that the people around me were supposed to look to for advice and for guidance didn't know anything about, but that I was able to work with my mom and translate climate resources into Farsi so that I could teach my relatives about climate change, and so the simple action that I was able to do was able to have an enormous result on actually ensuring my relatives knew about this issue, and for me, that was really the first step that I took on my journey to becoming a climate address and to doing the work that I'm doing today, and so I spent the rest of my high school years. I was Energized by what I did in Iman and I came back to the US, and I spent high school volunteering with Greta's Fridays for Future and movements like Zero Hour to really mobilize my fears, to go out into the streets to strike for climate action, to find ways that they could implement and talk about sustainability in their communities. And what that led me to do was during my senior year of high school, when I was 18. I decided to start climate hard school because, although I had all these experiences volunteering with these various climate organizations, I realized that there was still a crucial factor that was missing, which was that almost all of our literature, all of our resources, were only available in English. And that's despite the fact that 75% of the world doesn't even speak English. But 80% of scientific literature is only available in English, and even the UN's IPCC report, which is widely regarded as most renowned peace climate literature in the world, is only officially available in the 61 languages that account for less than half of the world's speaking population.
Sophia Kianni:All of us should say that there was this enormous issue that I was really shocked that some of the largest climate organizations in the world seemed to not really be doing anything about. So in my senior year of high school, I viciously decided to start climate journals with the goal of ensuring everyone, everywhere, could access climate education, and so we, on the very first day we launched, used social media and were able to reach hundreds of thousands of people and had over a thousand young people, with an average age of 16, sign up to volunteer with us. And over the last few years, we've now grown to over 10,000 volunteers across eight countries and we've been able to translate over a million and a half words of climate resources into over a hundred languages, with almost no fundraising working completely on a volunteer basis in between homecoming dances and homework Because we cared so much about making an impact in the face of the climate crisis and I always would have my friends and have my parents.
Sophia Kianni:People ask me why I was spending all my time really on my computer, in my door or in my bedroom working so hard to advance this issue without any expectation of return. And the truth is it's because the reality of the climate crisis is shocking. It's scary when you think about the fact that my generation is already experiencing the impacts of the climate crisis that are three times higher than our grandparents. There is unprecedented flooding around the world, there are droughts, there are heat waves. Look at what's happening in Hawaii right now Wildfires are dramatically exacerbated by climate change and my response always was of course, I'm doing this work.
Amanda Klimak:Of course.
Sophia Kianni:I care and, in fact, how can other people not care?
Sophia Kianni:And in the course of my work with climate cardinals, there are a few different learnings that I had, namely about the power of partnerships and collaboration.
Sophia Kianni:And so, about six months after I started climate cardinals, I was nominated by the UN to join the UN Secretary General's inaugural youth advisory group on climate change, and I served for two and a half years in the role as the youngest climate advisor to the UN, and in the experience, it was an incredible learning for me to see how young people could push the UN to be more ambitious and to push the UN to implement what we thought were incredibly effective pieces of messaging, mainly around the fact that we need to end all new causes of youth development and that we need to invest heavily in recruiting young people, young talent, and bringing them to the decision-making table so that progressive voices like mine, entrepreneurs, people who want to move the world forward actually have a stake and the ability to influence outcomes.
Sophia Kianni:And so that leads to kind of the most recent development of my work with climate cardinals, which was that a few months ago, we actually partnered with Google and were able to leverage their newest AI, machine learning-assisted transition technologies to translate over 800,000 words of climate resources into over 40 languages. And so now my experiences have really shown me a positive across a vast variety of disciplines, that, whether it be in the non-profit sector, with climate cardinals, and the government sector with the UN, or in tech, with Google, everyone has the opportunity to make a difference and to do their part, and in fact, the world is better for these different entities collaborating and working together to move the world forward. And I'm not here to preach to the choir, because they know many of you care dramatically about sustainability and about moving your industry forward, but really my hope is to also talk about the reasons why, and the reasons why you need to be rooted in the urgency and the fact that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the world's industrial emissions.
Sophia Kianni:So, no matter how much I do, or individuals and young people do, the reality is that the people in power, the ones who are the stakeholders and the CEOs these are the ones you need to lead by example and selectively make these choices to be bold and ambitious and not just think about the bottom line, but to think about it from the face of human rights and about investing in this generation, my generation and ensuring that we have a livable future, because the recent events that we've been seeing truly are shocking, they're heartbreaking and it's scary for me as a young person, and the only thing that I can do, and that many people can do, is use our voices.
Sophia Kianni:Use our voices to share our stories and to talk about why we think sustainability is so important, and even when it does come to the bottom line.
Sophia Kianni:The statistics show over half of Gen Z and millennials are willing to pay more when it comes to investing in products and services and experiences that are certified as sustainable, and, of course, in the hospitality industry and the tourism industry is responsible for 8% of global emissions, and then 20% of that comes directly from the hotel industry and hospitality, and there's a wide variety of steps that many of the people here are already taking, whether it ranges from improving energy efficiency to improving waste production.
Sophia Kianni:There's a myriad of steps that can be taken, but really the group needs to come from the right place, which needs to be. The sense of urgency needs to be rooted in the calls from scientists around the world, the calls from young people around the world, explaining that this is not a matter of just the business, but also a matter of humanity and protecting our planet for future generations to come. Thank you, guys, so much for having me, for allowing me the space to share my story. I'm excited to see what you all do to really move your industry and also the future of society. Thank you.
Amanda Klimak:What a privilege and honor it was to hear her speak this morning. I have to say, what I found the most amazing part of that entire discussion was that Sophia is 21 years old. I think this kind of education in our industry and everything else is so important, and I'm so glad you joined me here today on the Please Go Away Travel podcast. Thanks so much, everyone and look forward to sharing other interviews from here at Virtuoso Travel Week in Las Vegas, nevada. See you soon.