About

Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa is a Caribbean and Japanese American climate justice activist, Indigenous Studies researcher, and social entrepreneur.

Hayakawa is the Executive Director and a founding director of Climate Cardinals, one of the world’s largest youth-led climate advocacy organizations with 16,000 volunteers in 134 countries and 130 chapters in 35 countries. Hayakawa established Climate Cardinals’ signature translation program in partnership with Translators Without Borders and Google Cloud. As a full-time student, he expanded Climate Cardinals’ translation capacity to a million words per year, handled translation requests for over two million words of climate information, and fundraised for a six-figure budget, with Climate Cardinals becoming one of the first-ever youth-led organizations to be funded by Google’s philanthropic branch. Now, he works full-time for Climate Cardinals.

Hayakawa also represents Climate Cardinals as part of UNESCO’s Youth Climate Action Network Steering Committee and the WHO Youth Council, together with Climate Cardinals' Research Director. Hayakawa has spoken about his work for Google, Deloitte, Smithsonian, UNESCO, the UN Development Programme, the Italian Ministry of the Environment, and the U.S. Interagency Group on Climate Literacy. His work has also been featured in Axios, the Guardian, Forbes, and Teen Vogue.