Science teacher-turned-content creator Biogirl MJ to raise eco-awareness of climate change

SINGAPORE – Seeing Singapore’s corals turn a ghostly white in 2016 sent shock waves through Ms Kong Man Jing, and the impact of a warming world struck home for her.

Coral bleaching occurs when warming waters caused by climate change cause stress to these fragile ecosystems.

“I was doing marine surveys at the intertidal zone for a module in university, and I noticed how white these corals were. There were no signs of life around them,” said the 29-year-old environmental science graduate, who is behind the popular science and education channel Just Keep Thinking on Instagram and TikTok.

Ms Kong will be among at least 35 young Singaporeans attending the COP28 climate change conference in 2023. Ensuring participation from youth, women and indigenous people is a key objective of COP28.

The annual United Nations conference will be held in Dubai from Nov 30 to Dec 12, when nations will meet to discuss ways to raise climate ambition, and limit warming to 1.5 deg C above pre-industrial temperatures. The world has so far warmed by around 1.2 deg C.

Ms Kong’s first-hand coral bleaching experience opened her eyes to how the loss of biodiversity can be so closely intertwined with climate change, and how humankind has to pay the price. 

Healthy corals are crucial for sustaining marine life – such as fish, crustaceans and molluscs – while attenuating wave energy, which reduces the effects of coastal erosion. Communities living by the sea rely on reef creatures for food.

In 2023 alone, the world experienced record-breaking heat waves in Asia, North America, Europe and China. In Singapore, the mercury reached a staggering 37 deg C in May, equalling a 40-year record for highest daily temperature.

Higher temperatures allow mosquitoes and other insects to breed faster, increasing the risk of dengue and other vector-borne diseases.  

But while some climate change effects are visible and apparent – like coral bleaching – others are not, which makes it difficult to convey the urgency of the situation, said Ms Kong. 

“And that’s the dangerous part. When we finally realise its impact, usually things are a little bit too late, much like frogs in boiling water that don’t feel the temperature increase until the water has reached boiling point – and by then, they can’t escape” she added. 

“We can’t be like those frogs. So we must do something about this now.”

Ms Kong, whose online handle is Biogirl MJ, sees Just Keep Thinking as a way of nudging sustainability education to the public, in bite-size chunks that are easy to understand. 

Her channel, which has garnered a huge following on TikTok and Instagram, is also sprinkled with fun, quirky and relatable facts – think Pokemon ecology and Barney as a reptile. 

Quite a number of families regularly watch Ms Kong’s videos together, she said, and in fact, some children recognise her in public even without her signature get-up of a pair of big spectacles and a yellow dress.

She fell in love with science from age five after her mother gave her an encyclopaedia. Her love of nature developed when she joined a two-night camp on St John’s Island with the school’s science club.

“I explored our nature areas for the first time, the forests, the mangroves, and our marine shores, and I wanted to know them and learn more about them. The rest is history,” she added.

She started the company, which shares its name with the channel, in 2019, with her fiance Raye Ng, 34, while juggling her job as a science teacher at The Learning Lab tuition centre.

Two years later, she became a full-time content creator, which affords her the freedom to be as creative as possible. 

In the first year, Just Keep Thinking on Instagram had 66,000 followers; it now has 233,000 followers and gets around 44,000 views for each of its videos.

One of her videos, for example, looks at how erratic weather in Antarctica is affecting divorce rates of the albatross. These birds often mate for life, but once they are unable to breed successfully due to high-stress conditions and the lack of food sources, the female albatross leaves the male in search of another partner.

Other videos explain the different climate phenomena affecting the hot weather in Singapore, such as El Nino.  

As her viewers are mainly young people, Ms Kong hopes she can mould and influence them to become eco-stewards of the future.

“My generation and the generations after me will be suffering the brunt of climate change, and so it is imperative that we understand the urgency of the situation to take climate action and protect whatever biodiversity we have left,” she added.

One of her favourite videos to date, because of the impact it had, is one she did on intertidal etiquette, where she spelt out the dos and don’ts of exploring the vast expanse of shore at low tide.

Ms Kong, who has a particularly strong affinity for marine life, said it distressed her to see how members of the public attempted to remove creatures, like sea urchins, from the beach to take them home.   

“It really revealed the ugly consequences of the lack of education and awareness of one’s natural environment,” she said. 

Since her video was uploaded in February 2022, the nature community and government agencies have come together and taken action: Informative sign boards have been erected, guides were created on proper intertidal etiquette, and volunteers have also been trained to conduct patrols to watch out for incorrect behaviour.

“This was a testament to how much of a difference we can create if we all work together and contribute in our own ways,” said Ms Kong. 

With 2023 now drawing to a close, the content creator has set her sights on the most important climate conference of the year – COP28.  

During her time in Dubai, Ms Kong hopes to give viewers a clearer understanding of what happens over the course of the two weeks there.

“I honestly heard about the existence of COP only two years ago, and I wondered to myself, ‘Why is nobody talking about it and does anybody even care?’” she said.

While it can be difficult for many to understand what is discussed at the conference, Ms Kong wants to tell people “what is being done behind the scenes to tackle (climate change), while making it interesting at the same time”.

“We cannot protect something we do not love, and we cannot love what we do not know. So that’s what I’ve set out to do – educate people through powerful storytelling, and maybe the fate of planet earth can have a better outcome,” she said.