On December 11th of 2008, CAS academician XU Guanhua gave a lecture on research prospect of global change. It was organized by the Department of Basic Research of MOST and chaired by Vice Minister CAO Jianlin.

As for how to strengthen research on global change, XU proposed to:

1) base the research on Chinese circumstances, give prominence to frontier research, strengthen interdisciplinary development, and attach importance to the mechanism of the interaction among earth layers;

2) avoid repetition of single disciplinary research, highlight major issues in Chinese socioeconomic development and issues of common concern by different countries;

3) strengthen efforts in weak links of current research on global change, including mutual influence between human activities and global change, geo-system model, application of earth observation data, and global change economics.