On the sidelines of the 17th China-EU Summit, Professor Huadong Guo, Director-General of the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth (RADI) and Vladimír Šucha, Director-General of the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) signed a new collaborative research arrangement in Brussels on 29 June. The event was witnessed by Chinese Premier LI Keqiang, President of the European Council Donald Tusk, and President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker.
According to the agreement, the two parties will contribute to addressing global challenges, such as sustainable development, climate action and disaster risk reduction, and the cooperation will be reinforced and extended to six major fields of earth observation and Digital Earth including:
- human settlements analysis
- digital earth science platform
- land and soil degradation
- air quality
- land cover mapping, and
- agricultural monitoring.
Collaborative activities will include exchange of scientific and technological information, joint training programmes, participation in the implementation of on-going programmes, projects and related activities of mutual interest to the parties. At the 2nd China-EU Innovation Cooperation Dialogue held on the same day, Prof. Guo delivered a talk on the development of earth observation and Digital Earth in China and the perspectives for SINO-EU cooperation in the field.
JRC is the European Commission’s in-house science service and a staff member,Daniele Ehrlich, co-chairs the IRDR DATA Working Group. A long-term project for co-designing sience and policy dialogue initiatives is under way between ICSU and JRC.
