Biography

Crystal Chow is an award-winning freelance journalist from Hong Kong, primarily writing in-depth reporting and feature stories on environmental and development issues with a specialized focus on Southeast Asia. Striving to better inform the Chinese-speaking readers of the multifaceted human impacts of climate change, her recent reporting interests focus on technological solutions to the world’s environmental crises, and the ways climate change would affect food production, land use, public health, and migration patterns.

Recipient of two regional media awards, and various international reporting grants and media fellowships - including story grants from the International Women’s Media Foundation and Africa-China Reporting Project - her notable works include the indigenous movement against the then-proposed Baram Dam project in Malaysian Borneo, Duterte’s rise and the “drug war” in the Philippines, as well as the illicit trade of South African abalone and its connections with Chinese markets. Her IWMF-supported project explores the relations between climate-induced displacement and human trafficking in the Central Philippines and the gender-sensitive approaches for community disaster response.

A Cultural Studies major, she holds a MSc in Global Energy and Climate Policy, with an elective in International Environmental Law, from SOAS, University of London.