New correspondent: Hui Ma from Xiamen University, China

Today our team was joined by a new correspondent from China. Her name is Hui Ma, studying Ecology at Xiamen University in eastern China. She recognises all kinds of environmental and climate change related issues in China and the rest of the world and that’s why she’s motivated to help unroll our platform. This means: help us find suitable subjects to be featured in her country. We first asked her to answer some questions.

Hi Hui Ma, can you introduce yourself?

My name is Hui Ma, I’m a first-year doctoral student at Xiamen University. I major in Ecology and my research interests focus on mRNA polyadenylation in plants, including its ecological impacts and the molecular mechanisms.

What motivated you to choose for this study?

We are facing serious environmental pollution and ecological destruction in China, it’s sad to say so but it is true. Besides, many environmental problems such as climate change and extinction of species are threatening not only China but the entire world. I think it’s really important to understand ecological theories and grasp professional skills to do something for the broken ecosystem before it’s too late. This is the biggest motivation for me to choose Ecology.

What are your ambitions? How would you like to develop your future career?

I want to be a researcher, exploring more undiscovered issues in the field and moreover, I really want to spread the ideas of environmental protection and ecological friendly lifestyle widely. Taking part in some environmental organizations could be helpful to realize this. It would be exciting if some good changes can be seen in people’s daily life and at policy making level. I’m happy to see the policy makers are paying more attention to environmental protection and many splendid international organizations (like Cool Down The Planet) are playing admirable roles in making a change.

Do you see any consequences from climate change in your region? If yes, can you give an example?

Yes, there was adequate precipitation in winter a decade ago in my hometown HeBei province (north China) , while I can barely see snow in recent years. This lead to severe drought in next spring and decrease of crop production. Meanwhile, in south-east China, mangrove forests are under threat because of sea level rise. Mangrove is an important plant with multiple ecological functions in coastal area, since dams were built behind those forests, they have no room to migrate when tide rises and the mangrove populations keep reducing.

What do you consider is a strong quality of the Cool Down The Planet formula? 

Cool Down The Planet is building a platform that can gather professional ‘crowd engineers’ and students from different fields in different countries, the network and creative brain storm are amazing. To handle with a problem like Global Warming, which involves a lots of technical and logistical questions, creation and cooperation are significant and Cool Down The Planet ensures that. From my point of view, trying to implement the solutions in reality could be the most important quality of the formula.