Editor's note: The 2025 SMART Talks on Climate Change program, jointly organized by Yale Center Beijing and Yale Center for Carbon Capture, culminated in an essay competition where participants submitted essays on "What is a natural climate solution you have observed in your own context? How might implementing this solution at the local level create an impact on the global scale?" This is a piece written by one of the winners of the 2025 essay competition.

Three years ago, the vacant lot behind my building was a pile of old bricks and shattered glass. The children called it "the junkyard." Now, it’s a quilt of green: Mrs. Li tends her tomatoes, Mr. Wang waters his chives, and some teenagers constructed a compost bin out of wood pallets. It is not a garden. It is a little bit of Beijing fighting climate change—one shovelful at a time.

Beijing’s a busy city, right? Skyscrapers shoot up like bamboo, cars jam the roads, and most days, you’d think there’s no room for dirt. But look closer. All over the city, empty spaces are turning into gardens: on rooftops, in schoolyards, even between apartment buildings. These aren’t just pretty—they’re quietly helping cool the planet.  

Here's how it goes: Plants take up carbon dioxide, the gas that warms the planet. A small community garden will not save the planet, but imagine all of them together. The city estimates that Beijing's community gardens absorb around 15,000 tons of carbon each year. That's equivalent to taking 3,000 cars off the road for a year. And that's only the beginning: soil is cooler than concrete. When it's a hot summer afternoon, the garden in the back of my house is 10 degrees cooler than the parking lot in front of it. That means fewer air conditioners, which power themselves through electricity that comes from burning coal, are needed. It's a cycle—gardens cool us down, so we don't consume as much energy, which produces less pollution.

Yet, some will argue, "What's the use? One garden won't save the world." But that’s not how climate change works. It's not one giant issue; it's a million tiny issues and a million tiny solutions. Beijing's gardens are setting an example for other cities to follow. Take a look at a rooftop garden in an elementary school in the Haidian District. The children are growing lettuce and learning about composting. And now, their parents are doing likewise at home. A restaurant in Dongcheng prefers to grow its own herbs in its backyard garden instead of trucked-in ones from another place, as it means fewer truck emissions. These small things add up to create large impacts.

But the best is not the numbers. It's the way the gardens change people. Last month, Mrs. Li handed me a bag of her tomatoes. "Try that?" she said. "No chemicals, no truck haul from another province." I thought about how most of the food in my fridge travels hundreds of miles just to be there, burning gas all the way to make the trip. Now I am growing my own basil. That is the real magic: once you have grown something, you think differently about waste, about energy, about the Earth. You will never want to throw away even a tiny bit of food after you’ve spent weeks watching a seed turn into a vegetable.

Of course, it's not easy. Now and then, the gardens are waterlogged, or they dry out. Developers want to build on some of the empty lots. And let's be honest—gardening takes hard work. But whenever I take a walk along the back lot near my building at sunset and glimpse the children chasing fireflies between the rows of cornstalks, I think it's all worth the effort. Since these gardens started popping up, Beijing’s air feels a little fresher. The thick smog days are fewer and fewer, and today, more and more people are talking about "doing their share."  

Maybe we don't need large, elaborate plans to save the planet. Maybe we simply need to start small: sow one seed, build one compost heap, give away what we reap. One Beijing garden won't stop the world from warming, but if every city planted one, anything can happen. After all, the biggest changes often start with something tiny—like a seed pushing through the dirt. In Beijing, those seeds are already sprouting.

References

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