Language shouldn't be a barrier to climate action. -- Sophia Kianni
Hello. This is the first entry on the North South Climate Dialogue blog — a working notebook for the people building a bilingual climate vocabulary, one term at a time.
What you'll find here
This blog will collect a few kinds of writing:
- Notes from the workshops. Short recaps of the in-person language-exchange sessions we run in Vancouver, including the surprises that come up when two people sit down to translate a climate term together.
- Essays on the words themselves. What does 净零排放 really mean in practice, and how does that sit alongside the English net zero? A term-by-term dig.
- Voices from the dialogue. Conversations with translators, climate workers, students, and immigrants navigating climate vocabulary in their second language.
Why bilingual, why now
Climate language is shaped by who's in the room. The English vocabulary of climate science and policy travels far, but it doesn't always travel cleanly into Chinese — and a lot of the most useful Chinese climate vocabulary doesn't show up in English-only spaces at all.
The 149 terms in our glossary are a starting point, not a finished list. We pick the ones that feel essential to a dialogue, then test them in flashcards and quizzes. What you're reading is part of the same project: writing down what we learn as we go.
Something to try
If you're new here, the best place to start is the Simple Pinyin Guide. It's a short field manual for reading the Chinese terms aloud — no prior Mandarin needed. Once you can sound out 气候 (qì hòu), every other term opens up.
We believe in the power of dialogue in the climate sector.