Gao

Shiqing

Gao Shiqing, male, born in Beijing, is an indigenous person of Beijing. He is 15 years old and a high school student at Keystone Academy. He started participating in the "Bringing Leopards Home" project of the Chinese Feline Federation in 2018 and have been doing so for 6 years now. The North China leopard is native to Beijing and inhabits Huairou. It has been extinct since 2005. In 2016, the "Cat Alliance" began to survey the biodiversity of the mountainous areas in North China and evaluate the potential for restoring the North China leopard population in Beijing. At the age of 10, Gao Shiqing began participating in this project as a volunteer, fully involved in the process of finding the leopard, finding the way back, and bringing the leopard home. In 2020, he discovered the closest North China leopard image to Beijing in Tuoliang, Hebei. In 2021, the United Nations Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Cop15) recognized Gao Shiqing as an excellent case of biodiversity conservation in China, and his documentary was screened at the opening ceremony of the conference; In June 2024, he recorded the return of a long lost red fox to the mountains and forests of northern Beijing. On November 12, 2024, as the only minor NGO observer from China attending Cop29, Gao delivered a speech titled Me, Beijing, and Climate Action at a side event called China’s Solutions to Promote Public Climate Action.