CitSciAsia Meets… Dr Shengnian Xu
Volume 2: Citizen Science in China.
The second episode of our CitSciAsia Meets… interview series has been posted, with Dr Shengnian Xu interviewed at his office in Beijing by Simon Dambe.
If you’ve still not seen the CitizenScience.Asia youtube channel you should check it out and subscribe here. We have recorded a number of interviews with Citizen Science practitioners from across Asia and beyond (see the previous posting providing a Japanese perspective on the City Nature Challenge), hopefully providing a forum for Citizen Scientists interested in sharing their stories with the community and the world.
In our second video CitizenScience.Asia had the pleasure to meet Dr Shengnian Xu, a program officer of the Energy and Climate Change team at the Global Environmental Institute (GEI; 中文：北京市朝阳区永续全球环境研究所; http://www.geichina.org/) in Beijing. Shengnian’s work includes developing a citizen science-based environmental protection strategy for western China to improve more grassroots data collection. As such, he has hands on insight into many of the Citizen Science projects going on in Mainland China. Particularly in the area of citizen managed water monitoring projects. As the most populous country in the world, how Citizen Science is practiced here and utilized to tackle the pressing environmental challenges is a particularly interesting and important topic, so we were extremely grateful to hear first hand from some of the key practitioners at GEI.
Shengnian very kindly showed Simon Dambe and Scott Edmunds from CitizenScience.Asia around the GEI office in the Sanjiangyuan area of Beijing. The Global Environmental Institute is a Chinese, non-profit, non-governmental organization founded in 2004 with the aim of securing sustainable development within the country’s borders and abroad. The organization works alongside policymakers, businesses, scientists, and civil society and local communities to foster dialogue and innovative solutions to protect the environment. It is the latter stakeholders: Citizen Scientists, that we are interested to hear about at CitizenScience.Asia, and Shengnian gives us some examples of the work GEI are doing in this area in China.
Citizen Science isn’t a new thing in China, citizens have collected data on locust outbreaks for nearly 2,000 years, but these efforts haven’t necessarily been labelled Citizen Science. Hopefully the efforts of GEI and others will increase awareness of China’s long and continued efforts in this area.
We have more videos to post and more public events to record (e.g. this one on citizen science and coffee production), so keep watching the channel to keep informed in what is happening in Citizen Science in Asia. If you’d like to be interviewed or share stories and videos relating to Citizen Science please let us know.
