Progress Made in Cooperation between AIR-CAS and FAO

On September 20th, Huang Wenjiang, the Director and Researcher of the Digital Earth Key Laboratory of the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (AIR-CAS), visited the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome, Italy. The two sides had in-depth exchanges on global food and agricultural resource monitoring, monitoring and early warning of major agricultural disasters and emergency decision-making, and serving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. They will jointly promote the joint application of international cooperation projects, strengthen cooperation in data sharing, personnel exchange, and information dissemination, etc.

René Castro-Salazar, Assistant Director-General of FAO, warmly welcomed Wenjiang Huang and his team and provided a detailed introduction to   work and progress of FAO in food security, land and water resources, climate and environment, important agricultural cultural heritage, as well as in serving the UN Sustainable Development Goals of Zero Hunger (SDG2) and Climate Action (SDG13). Jippe Hoogeveen, senior manager of the Land and Water Division, introduced the situation of the division's services for land resources and drought monitoring based on remote sensing technology worldwide. Zhongxin Chen, project manager of the IT department, outlined   important role of FAO in promoting agricultural sustainable development in the field of information construction and looked forward to deep cooperation with AIR-CAS in agricultural information innovation technology and other areas in the future.

Wenjiang Huang introduced in detail the history and development overview of AIR-CAS, showcasing its capabilities in integrated remote sensing data acquisition and processing, spatial earth information science and quantitative remote sensing basic research, digital earth science platform, global environmental and resource information analysis, and the ability to serve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In recent years, China has funded a series of large-scale research projects in the field of space-based Earth observation, including the Earth Big Data Science Engineering and global environmental and resource monitoring. The global resource and environmental monitoring platform and products developed by AIR-CAS have provided remote sensing spatial information services for the realization of the UN Sustainable Development Goals SDG2 and SDG13, and have achieved significant results.

Both sides agree that combining the high-level technological capabilities of the FAO in analyzing, evaluating, and monitoring global food and agricultural resources with the strong satellite data reception, processing platform, and application theory and technology of AIR-CAS, as well as the global environmental and resource spatial information system built based on the digital earth science platform of AIR-CAS, can carry out global environmental resource remote sensing monitoring and agricultural disaster emergency decision-making, serving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Wenjiang Huang and his team also visited the climate and environment, land and water, pest and disease control, and agricultural informatization departments of FAO.