Bridging the climate change language barrier

Miners working inside the Lutugin coal mine in Chystiakove (Torez) in the Donetsk region, Russian-controlled Ukraine. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has tried to make its global findings easier to understand in recent years after criticism from scientists about jargon being a barrier. — Reuters

INDIAN researcher Sabir Ahamed took a linguist’s help to translate the term “just transition” into Bengali for his new study on the impact of coal mine closures on local people, as countries start to shift from fossil fuels to clean energy.

Sabir settled on the somewhat poetic “kalo theke aalo”, which literally means “from darkness to hope”, after consulting the language expert for a phrase his target audience of coal communities in India’s state of West Bengal would understand.