【推荐1】“Four great inventions” in ancient China are important symbols of the country. Now China has “new four great inventions”: high-speed trains, mobile payment, bike sharing and online shopping. They are changing people’s lives in China and maybe all over the world.

High-speed trains

By the end of 2016, China had the world’s largest high-speed railway network. More than 2,500 high-speed trains are running across China each day.

Lin Jinlong, an oversea student from Cambodia shared his experience of traveling by Chinese high-speed train from Beijing to Tianjin. The two cities are over 100 km away, but the trip took only about half an hour. “That was amazing!” Lin said.

Mobile payment

Mobile payment has become a part of Chinese people’s everyday life. It makes their lives much more convenient. “My wallet is not in use any more. I can buy almost anything I want simply with my mobile phone,” said Lin. “Even vegetable sellers are using mobile payment.”

Bike sharing

Bike sharing is not new itself, but the bike sharing in China is special — it allows users to pick a bike anywhere in the city and leave it anywhere at the end of their journey. It’s really convenient, cheap and green. A bike sharing company called Mobile has even brought the service to other countries.

Online shopping

You are out if you have never shopped online. Now you can buy almost everything from website like Taobao and JD, and get what you’ve bought within days. China’s online shopping makes many foreigners feel both excited and amazed.

【推荐1】In 2007, the African Union announced an ambitious project—to plant the Great Green Wall (GGW), a band of trees that would stretch the length of the Sahel.

The GGW is an ecological restoration project designed by African people for African people. Heavy rains, droughts, wildfires and landslides have all become common throughout the world. But nowhere is quite like the Sahel. In this huge African region, climate change has materialized in a dramatic manner. In some cases, the severe conditions have left people with no option other than to migrate elsewhere to survive. It was with all of this in mind that the extraordinary, but heavily debated project was first put forward.

Fourteen years have passed since the initiative formally kicked off. The stated goal was to create a 15-kilometre-wide, 8, 000-kilometre-long green belt of trees and other plants that, by 2030, would span（跨越）the entire width of the Sahel, from Senegal to Djibouti. Overall, 100 million hectares（公顷）of land would be restored by 2030. Once completed, it was announced, the wall could end up capturing（俘获）250 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, while its creation and upkeep could create ten million jobs in rural areas.

Looking at the project as a whole, there’s still a long way to go. According to a status report by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, about four million hectares of degraded land have been restored. This means that progress towards the 100 million hectares target stands at just four per cent.

“When we started restoring the soil, we realized the area at risk was much wider than we initially thought,” explains Elvis Paul Tangem, the African Union’s GGW coordinator. “We had few funds to push the initiative as much as we wanted to. There was skepticism among investors, who didn’t understand the project, but also among the African states themselves, which needed time to figure out if the GGW was a priority.”

【推荐3】Rising ocean temperatures killed about 14% of the world’s coral reefs in just under a decade, according to a new analysis from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. In other words, the amount of coral lost between 2008 and 2019 equals more than all of the living corals in Australia. The report — the first of its kind since 2008 — found that warming caused by climate change has placed coral reefs under “continuous stress.”

But it also found signs of hope, noting that many of these reefs may be able to recover if immediate action is taken to fight future warming. “People around the world depend on healthy coral reefs and the services they provide for food, entertainment, and protection from storms,” said Jennifer Koss, director of the NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program. “It is possible to reduce the losses we are seeing and save these reefs, but doing so relies on us as a global community making more environmentally friendly decisions in our everyday lives.”

NOAA calls this the largest global analysis of coral reef health ever made: “The analysis used data from nearly two million observations from more than 12,000 collection sites in 73 countries over 40 years (1978 to 2019), representing the work over 300 scientists.” The study identifies “coral bleaching (褪色) events caused by rising sea surface temperatures” as the biggest cause of coral loss.

They also observed some recovery in 2019, with coral reefs regaining 2% of their coral cover. “This suggests that if pressures on these critical ecosystems ease, then coral reefs have the ability to recover, potentially within a decade, to the healthy reefs that were common pre-1998,” reads a GCRMN release. On the other hand, continued warming could cause greater damage. Sharp decreases in coral cover agreed with increases in sea surface temperature, which experts say shows coral’s vulnerability (易受伤害) to the sudden large increases — a phenomenon they say could happen more frequently as the planet continues to warm.