The young who have the planet on their mind
Young people are taking the lead in tackling environmental and biodiversity challenges. Twentyyear-old Cheng Haosheng from Macao, now studying in the School of Environment at Tsinghua University in Beijing, is one of them. He talks enthusiastically about his participation at the Global Youth Summit on Net-Zero Future held by the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate late last year.
The alliance was initiated by Tsinghua University and is now composed of 15 universities worldwide, including Oxford in the United Kingdom, Yale in the United States and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
The summit featured more than 30 student-led events, such as a climate-research competition, a Voice Track in which students delivered their multimedia messages about climate change, and a hackathon to energize youngsters to come up with innovative solutions. It is aimed at being a springboard for the world’s youth to take a more active role in mobilizing leadership and demonstrating the collective strengths of higher education institutions in facing pressing environmental issues, the alliance said.
“I recorded a video for the Voice Track, sharing what I witnessed during Typhoon Hato, my thoughts on climate change and the awareness campaigns and community work I have done in Macao,” Cheng said. (Typhoon Hato hit Macao, with devastating impact, in 2017.)
Cheng helped draft a youth declaration with students from around the globe during the summit that calls on governments to take notice of the effects of the climate crisis.
Cheng also played a positive role in writing media releases about each event during the summit and publishing them online.
“I realized once again the importance of regional and global cooperation for combating climate change. Many scholars, students, young people and citizens from around the globe are already working on the issue.”
In November the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, displayed his video to its audience of global climate leaders.
Cheng said he developed a sense of crisis when he was a teenager.
“I learned we have been burning a lot of fossil fuels that could not be regenerated, and that if we do not start implementing energy reform, we will face a resource-scarcity crisis. No power and no light, and that was beyond comprehension for me, since I relied on electricity and electronic devices every day.”
Like Cheng, Zhang Jiaxuan, 24, of Shandong province is committed to tackling climate change and studying sustainable development.
She took the national college entrance examination, or gaokao, in 2016 when the Paris Agreement was signed.
“Climate change was gaining a lot of attention in the country, and a great number of related media reports piqued my interest.”
As a result, she joined Tsinghua’s Global Environment Program, which covers environmental science and engineering, international relations, environmental economy and management, environmental law, overseas exchanges and learning.
“It just satisfied my interest in interdisciplinary studies,” she said.
Since entering the international environmental class she has had more opportunities to understand various global environmental problems and solutions.
She has taken part in various activities that broadened her view on the environment, including the 21st Tripartite Environment Ministers Meeting in 2019 and the Youth4Climate summit last year, which brought together about 400 youth climate leaders from 186 countries to adopt a collective declaration to be presented to ministers attending Pre-COP26 in Milan, and delivered by Italy to the delegates at COP26.
“As the only Chinese representative in the audience, it was very distressing for me to feel the anger, sadness and helplessness of hundreds of young people,” Zhang said. “At the same time, the unprecedented enthusiasm and determination demonstrated by the delegates to carry out climate action has further inspired me to continue to participate in, and contribute to the process of, addressing climate change.”
Over the past four years more than 1 million Chinese born in the 1990s and 2000s have donated money online to Chu Wenwen’s effort to protect wild Mengxin beavers in Altay prefecture of Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
The beaver has been listed as a first-class State-protected animal in China.
Chu, of Xinjiang, initiated the “beaver canteen” program, which seeks to develop 400,000 willow shrubs for the wild animal.
With their efforts, beaver families increased from 162 to 190 over the past four years, representing a 20% jump in the population of the semiaquatic rodent.
Chu has followed the work of her father since childhood. He was engaged in wildlife research. Upon graduation, she went back to her hometown out of love for nature.
“I am lucky to live in such a great era when young people can fulfill their aspirations while the country strongly supports nature conservation,” she said during her speech as the youth representative to the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, Southwest China’s Yunnan province in October.