How language barriers affect global climate literacy

Our planet is warming at an alarming rate. Climate change is one of the most serious global problems today. Its consequences affect every single person on Earth. So it seems perfectly logical that scientific publications on global warming are written in a global language: English.

And yet it is precisely because it is written in English that climate science is largely inaccessible to most people around the world.

To explain this apparent contradiction, we need to look at some numbers. Almost 90 % scientific publications worldwide are in English. This is the staggering dominance of just one language. But English, often called the global language, is spoken by only a minority of the world's population. ( Mario Saraceni, University of Portsmouth, more at theconversation.com)