CUHK Research: Changing the world

agricultural waste. But there is also a case for us to adjust our own food consumption. If we reduce our demand for meat and other high- emission foods, then we can help reduce climate change and air pollution, which could ultimately benefit our own health.” He says that changing to a less meat-intensive diet, such as that suggested by the 2016 revision of the Chinese government’s Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents, could reduce China’s nitrogen emissions by 20% and prevent up to 75,000 pollution-related premature deaths each year. Everything is interconnected “My research forms a closed circle,” Professor Tai explains. “I look into how air pollution and climate change affect agriculture and ecosystems; but I also look at how we can manage agriculture and forest ecosystems to address these pressing environmental problems.” For him, such two-way interaction goes to the heart of overcoming present challenges to sustaining life on our planet. His commitment to viewing the Earth as a complex system aligns with CUHK’s own Earth and Environmental Sciences Programme, which treats the Earth’s complex dynamics as part of one interconnected system. In his current role as Director of the Earth System Science Programme, he believes that an approach focusing only on individual issues neglects the full scale of the Earth’s complex problems. Only by seeing the entire system as one whole can sustainable development for our planet and human communities be achieved. Changing people’s choices Professor Tai’s work has already garnered many awards and scholarships. Among them, he was Hong Kong’s first recipient of the World Meteorological Organization Research Award for Young Scientists. He intends to continue his work on addressing climate change and environmental pollution from multiple, integrated perspectives, and his wish is that his work will “move the impacts of food production, dietary preferences and personal choices more towards the centre of the conversation”, encourage consumers to think more about their everyday actions and, together with producers and policymakers, strive for an economically thriving, more socially equitable and environmentally sustainable future. Immediate actions against climate change and air pollution can bring self-multiplying benefits to human individuals, societies, and all other forms of life on Earth. 68