Meng Xu (she/her) is a sophomore at King’s College London, studying International Relations. She believes that marine conservation is an issue that as global as the world and as personal as each individual. Growing up on the coast of Qingdao, a seaside city in northern China, she has witnessed the sea surface covered with hutai (blue-green algae) and the rubbish tourists carelessly discard. In advocating the popularization of marine knowledge, she hopes to increase public awareness of marine conservation and bring attention to plastic waste’s negative impact on the ocean.
In 2016 when she was 12, she joined a student volunteer group that visited almost all the rivers in her home city of Qingdao to report illegal sewage outlets and picked up rubbish from the rivers for over five years. And when she was in high school. She worked on the China Thinks Big competition and successfully produced a text-based interactive game to help primary students learn marine knowledge and entered the National Competition.
During the summer of her freshman year, she found her place in the Blue Ribbon Ocean Conservation Association (BROCA) as an intern. In BROCA, she gave lectures on cetacean science to children in mountainous areas of China, focusing on the current situation of the East Asian finless porpoise. She also acquired skills in first aid for stranded cetaceans and participated in many of the association’s cetacean rescue drills. In addition, she used her excellent writing skills to write many fascinating and academic articles for the association’s daily marine science popularisation work. She even created a section on interesting and sustainable traditional fishing methods and wrote four articles on the subject. She also wrote three articles on the topic of marine plastic pollution to help the public understand the damage plastic waste is doing to our ocean.
As a member of The World Ocean Day Youth Advisory Council, she hopes to draw more people’s attention to the issue of marine conservation, to learn about it, and to get involved in protecting it.