Sophia Kianni

Kianni speaking at the Black Friday climate strike in 2019

Kianni became interested in climate activism in middle school, when she was in Tehran, and one night she looked up at the night sky and could not see any stars due to the air pollution.[3] She later joined Greta Thunberg's group, Fridays for Future, and would take time off from class to support action on climate change.[3] She helped organize the 2019 Black Friday climate strike.[4] By 2019 she was a national strategist for Fridays for Future, and a national partnerships coordinator for Zero Hour, another environmental advocacy group.[5][4]

Jane Fonda (left) and Kianni (right) at Fire Drill Fridays DC event held in front of the Capitol Building.

In November 2019, 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, D.C., office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, demanding that she speak with them for an hour on camera about climate change.[6] Locally, there were roughly a dozen participants; at 17 years old, Kianni was the youngest, and one of two women.[2][7] 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.[2][8] Kianni wrote about her participation in the protest for Teen Vogue.[3] By February 2020, Kianni was both a member of and a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion.[9][10]

In the spring of 2020, Kianni's physical activism was curtailed by the school closing and social distancing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic, and her scheduled paid speaking engagements at colleges including Stanford University, Princeton University and Duke University were cancelled.[11][12] Kianni was able to continue her activism remotely with her talk at Michigan Technological University.[13] In addition, Kianni decided to accelerate development of a planned website, Climate Cardinals, that would translate climate change information into different languages.[11]

Climate Cardinals is a non-profit organization founded by Kianni to offer information about climate change in every language. It was named for the northern cardinal, the state bird of Virginia, and a metaphor for information flying around the world.[14][11] Kianni was inspired by the years she spent translating English-language climate change articles into Farsi for her Iranian relatives, as Iranian media barely covered the subject.[11] She says she noticed that environmental graphics, toolkits, and other informational content about climate change were either available only in English, or at best in Chinese and Spanish, which made them inaccessible to speakers of other languages.[14] Climate Cardinals would fill the gap for the others.

Climate Cardinals was launched in May 2020, and had 1100 volunteers sign up to become translators on its first day.[15] They also partnered with Radio Javan, an Iranian radio with over 10 million followers, to share graphics and translations with Iranians.[14] Climate Cardinals is sponsored by the International Student Environmental Coalition as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which allows students who participate in its translations to earn community service hours for their work, either fulfilling school requirements or improving college applications.[14]

Kianni wrote a 2019 article for Teen Vogue about the Pelosi office hunger strike.[3] In 2020, she wrote two articles about the effects of the coronavirus, for the Middle East edition of Cosmopolitan magazine about the effects on her extended family's celebration of Nowruz,[16] and another for Refinery29 about the effects on her daily schedule as a climate activist, which was widely syndicated.[1] She wrote an article for MTV News for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, which she helped coordinate.[17]

Kianni lives with her mother, father, younger sister, and two pet lovebirds, in McLean, Virginia.[5][12] She studied at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Middle School, where her team won the statewide Science Olympiad,[18] and at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where she was a National Merit Scholarship Program semifinalist.[11][19] As of 2020, she was applying to colleges to study public policy and sustainable business.[2]

Kianni received extensive media attention as an example of a teenager reacting to the social distancing measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic: CNN, Time magazine, and the Washington Post wrote about how she and her friends were moving personal interaction and even their physically cancelled senior prom to Zoom video chats, and TikTok videos.[5][12][20][21]