For a better climate

You could say the climate changed in the November chill for Gao Jun, a student at Tsinghua University's global environment program at the School of Environment, when she came first in her major and, following a successful interview, scooped prize money of 15,000 yuan ($2,132).

Just over a week later Gao was again interviewed and awarded a Rhodes scholarship, a global postgraduate award.

"The preparation for both interviews was a process of self-inspection. Apart from college life, I participated in various activities," Gao says.

The champion for greater environmental awareness knows what's on her horizon.

"I am certain of one thing－no matter how the environment changes, my goal, to do good for the environment and society, never changes," Gao says.

Born and raised in Chongqing, Gao was passionate about environmental issues since childhood, whether it was water quality or sorting waste.

She became even more driven when she watched Under the Dome, a documentary about air pollution in China made by Chai Jing in 2015.

She got to know about the environmental major in the first year of high school when a lecturer came to her class to introduce Tsinghua's environment school.

She then went to a summer camp a year later where her interest was piqued further in Tsinghua's global environment program, so she chose it as her first major after the college entrance exam.

While in college, she studied courses on global environmental cooperation, finance, policy, and diplomacy, as required by the program.

Gao took part in the UN Sustainable Development Goals Summer School in 2017 visiting Geneva in Switzerland and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.

In the summer school, she and her team developed a low-cost open water quality-monitoring device and a mobile application to map real-time water quality.

"As each team was asked to pick a sustainable development goal, our team chose one to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all," Gao recalls.

The device they designed is now stationed at Tsinghua's Lab for Lifelong Learning, which is open for students, and anyone interested, to experience and learn about solving problems creatively.

A water purifier project in rural Pingyao, Shanxi province, saw her and her colleagues tackling immediate and pressing problems. They helped build and maintain more than 80 self-designed water purifiers there through simple methods that "use iron nails and sand to filter the water".

Each purifier costs about 200 yuan and is paid for by Tsinghua University's Environmental Protection Association.

She is also the vice-president of the association, who twice hosted the Model United Nations Climate Change Conference and conducted field research on photovoltaic development in China.

Last January, Gao initiated a research project on photovoltaic power generation in China. She organized 28 students to form four research groups to visit nine provinces and municipalities, such as Sichuan, Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu provinces, Beijing and Shanghai.

"We interviewed the local grid staff to see the profit-and-loss situation of their photovoltaic power generation, and also the application of it in impoverished counties," Gao says.

Gao and her team members went to Panzhihua in Sichuan province during winter vacation in 2018 and visited many places, such as the local government and grid bureau, the photovoltaic poverty alleviation power stations and new-energy companies. They conducted a cost-benefit analysis of PV projects under multiple scenarios, compared the different projects' financial potential, and completed the report last August.

Their report about it was presented at a news conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Poland last December.

"We made a poster exhibiting the result of our project, which shows that China emphasizes the combined benefits of solar PV in poverty alleviation, crop-production increase and enhancing energy reservation," Gao says.

Gao has organized TED Talks on environmental issues and invited four guests to tell their stories: a lecturer from her School of Environment talking about soil pollution, a Pakistani scholar on water pollution, a US scholar on food wastage and a lecturer on environmental protection.

"The last presenter was my English-language teacher. She told us how she did little things to help protect the environment the best she could, and she showed us BBC's Blue Planet documentary series," Gao recalls.

Gao herself is also doing the small things to help protect the environment, such as going partly vegetarian, except occasionally eating fish or seafood, and ordering no takeaways due to excessive packaging.

"I try to persuade my roommate not to order takeaways, but it's up to them, because it's true that it's often a contradiction between protecting the environment and convenience in life," Gao says.

Besides her busy academic work, she loves dancing and is a member of Tsinghua's rhythmic gymnastics team, who just won gold in the group competition and second place in the "five ribbons" routine at the 2019 national students' rhythmic gymnastics competition.

Gao has been a visiting student at University of Oxford for nine months until this June, and she got A plus for most of the economics courses she took. She met international and Chinese Rhodes scholars, who encouraged her to apply for the scholarship.

Now a Rhodes scholar herself, and with funding of 50,000 pounds ($65,717) per year, she is going back to Oxford next year, to pursue a master's degree in economics.

"I've learned that the causes of environmental problems are complicated, economics being one of them. I want to learn more about it and do more research and analysis so that I can provide some advice to solve the problems," Gao says.