Yale Climate Connections (YCC) is doing powerful work connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change across the United States, and ensuring that that information is accessible to individuals for whom English is not their first language. An initial round of pilot CO2 Foundation funding for the Yale team jump-started a Spanish-language hub for climate information, and this work was so thoughtful and productive that the Foundation gladly renewed funding for the project in 2024.
This year, the team will continue to work with its partners, Climate Cardinals, a youth-led nonprofit which provides pro bono translations, and La Red Hispana, which distributes articles to U.S.-based Hispanic audiences. Bilingual features editor Pearl Marvell will build and maintain relationships with partners, recruit and oversee Spanish-speaking writers, translate breaking weather news, and report on climate change and extreme weather from Puerto Rico, where she plans to spend a month in 2024. The team plans to publish one new Spanish-language feature per week during the “off” season for extreme weather, which typically runs from January-May and November-December. From June through October, when heat waves, wildfires, and hurricanes are common, the team will provide accessible breaking news coverage of major extreme weather events that affect Spanish speakers in the U.S., the Caribbean, and Mexico.
The Spanish-language news hub is solidifying as a media channel in its own right; it is taking great care to not merely present translated versions of Yale Climate Connections’ English-language work. At U.S. news organizations, Spanish-language climate coverage is almost non-existent; very few newsrooms have a Spanish-speaking climate change reporter. That’s a problem because there is more trust among U.S. Spanish-speaking populations in sources who speak Spanish and can speak to personal experiences with the issues they are engaging with. As one participant in a Latinx community listening session put it, “translation is only 25% of the job. You need to appeal to the stories, the voices, the storytellers that are inside the community.” To that end, three Latinx contributors will work on this next phase of the Yale project, and the team has lately begun publishing articles written first in Spanish and then translated to English.
The team has found that Spanish speakers at times have different information needs than English-language audiences; for instance, many Spanish speakers work outdoors or love someone who does, which may explain why this audience has been more interested than English speakers in stories about heat stroke. In addition, language access is even more important during extreme events, as stress causes people’s proficiency in a second language to decrease. English-language learners who are experiencing or recovering from an extreme event will often have a harder time reading and understanding resources in English. Too, Spanish-language climate disinformation tends to spike during extreme weather events: typically, bad actors identify misleading English-language content that they think will be popular, then translate it or add voice overs and promote it to Spanish-speaking communities. These differing information needs underscore the importance of using engaged journalism to better understand — and meet — the needs of these audiences.
What’s more, there is a very high level of diversity within Latino communities in the U.S. People are often connected by countries of origin and have different lived experiences with weather events depending upon where they are from. For example, Puerto Ricans and Cubans are familiar with hurricanes, but Peruvians tend not to be. These differences play out in how people understand and respond to extreme weather emergencies. Needs also vary based on where they are in the United States: Latinx communities in the Southwest are suffering from extreme heat, while coastal communities are seeing flooding and coastal erosion impacts. Wildfires are a particular concern in the West. First-generation immigrants are especially vulnerable to weather extremes because they don’t have a lifetime of weather knowledge related to their new place of residence. Latinx communities are often over-exposed to fossil fuel pollution causing asthma and other health challenges; stories about the health and the effects of climate change on children and elders and the impacts of climate change on migration patterns are important and under-reported areas.
In order to better match its work with the needs of Spanish-speaking audiences, the Yale Climate Connections team will be gathering and answering readers’ questions about climate change and extreme weather. Informal networks are extremely important for Spanish speakers in search of weather information: it can be hard for them to access severe weather warnings because of the language barrier, so they rely on friends and family to communicate those messages. YCC’s goal is to publish 10 reader-driven articles between June and December 2024, coinciding with extreme events and higher reader traffic, and then follow up with a live online session toward the end of 2024 in which experts will answer additional reader questions. This session will be modeled on a recent webinar organized by Yale colleagues that included simultaneous English/Spanish interpretation of presentations by scientists and a meteorologist.
Finally, the team aims to test the hub’s potential role in promoting resilience-related behaviors, focusing on solutions and connecting information to action. The team is taking great care to address readers’ questions. Furthermore, in conversations with Puerto Ricans, YCC editor Pearl Marvell heard that island residents are proud of what they’ve accomplished to protect the climate and want to see themselves represented in stories. Reader surveys are underway, and the site is set up to collect readers’ pledges — such as pledges to create a family evacuation plan — starting in June, with follow-up, support, and evaluation to follow from July through December.
UPDATE: The Foundation team is thrilled to report that Yale Climate Connections has completed an article about an organization whose upcoming work we are funding this year; stay tuned for an official news piece about Chispa AZ!