Youth Project Researcher of Shanghai Green Light-Year
Zihan Gao, currently a XJTLU grade two student major in information management and information system. In 2023, she took part in a ESG workshop hold by Shanghai Green Light-Year and firstly found her passion in sustainable food transition. It was then she became a Youth Project Researcher of Green Light-Year and deeply research about the sustainable development, mainly on food and agriculture.
In the period from June to December 2023, Zihan reapplied the World Benchmarking Alliance’s (WBA) benchmarks to evaluate the ESG reports of the 27 most influential Chinese companies in the field of Food and agriculture, then produced the companies’ ESG performance reassessment report and made improvement suggestions. By studying the methodology of WBA’s food and agriculture benchmark, she had a clear structure of the food system and learned that the sustainable food transition is a whole process from the farm to the dinning-table. As her first project-based learning, this research led her position start to change from student to researcher, and made her further reflect the contribution of food companies to the transformation of sustainable food systems instead of just analysis from the theory she learned.
During the research, she took part in a field trip in Shanghai Liantang Town with her colleagues. She studied the manufacture of zizania aquatica leaves braided with inheritors and discussed the development of zizania aquatica industry in Liantang Town. She learned that the destroy of zizania aquatica leaves is a great cost of resources and pollutes the environment, so Liantang Town makes the zizania aquatica leaves into handicrafts and gives it new life in manufacturing industry. Zihan practically feel the necessity of cooperation with other industries of sustainable agricultural development through this field trip and initiated the research of how can the agriculture system in Liangtang Town be further transformed in the future.
In January 2024, Zihan joined the “farmer’s market” with the Green Lightyear’s Bugs 4 Oceans project. She used the popularization of science quizzes to introduce the insect protein that can replace the marine animal protein in pet food and alleviate marine ecosystem pressures. Most participants are children, and their passion for acquiring sustainability knowledge and establishing Low-Carbon dietary habits inspired her to continue her study and research in sustainability and spread the concept of sustainable food to more people.
She is now major in the research of digital inclusion, aiming to learn how digital technologies can be used to promotes sustainable food transformation and reduce educational disparities in agricultural cultivation and aquaculture. She hopes to use her academic background in information systems to make the food system more digitization.