The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme ( IGBP) is an international scientific research programme initiated and organized by the International Council for Science ( ICSU) at 1986. IGBP′s mission is to deliver scientific knowledge to help human societies develop in harmony with Earth′s environment. IGBP′s scientific objective is to describe and understand the interactive physical, chemical and biological processes that regulate the total Earth System, the unique environment that it provides for life, the changes that are occurring in this system, and the manner in which they are influenced by human actions. IGBP is nongovernmental international science and technological organization, and headquarter is located at Sweden.

CNC-IGBP, led by CAST directly, is an academic organization for promoting our country to attend IGBP activities. Its missions are as follow: (1) To attend some activities related on behalf of China. (2) To promote and coordinate related Chinese branches for global change researches and academic activities. (3) To provide scientific counseling for resource/environmental management and sustainable development. (4) To help related branchesto finish international co-operation project . (5) To expand science propaganda and popularization on global change research to the public.

In addition, 10 workgroups and 1 information center were affiliated to CNC-IGBP, including: Global Analysis, Integration, and Modeling (GAIM); Past Global Changes (PAGES); Remote Sensing / Data information System (RS/DIS); Land Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone / Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (LOICZ/JGOFS); Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE); Biospheric Aspects of the Hydrological Cycle (BAHC); Tibet Plateau and Global Change (TPGC); Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC/IMBER); Land-Use/Cover Change (LUCC); Surface Ocean - Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS); Information Center for the Global Change Studies (IC/GCS). Most workgroups are located at Beijing, LOICZ/JGOFS and GLOBEC are located at Qingdao, and IC/GCS is located at Lanzhou.

Since 1986, China has invested huge amount of money on a large scale in global change research. According to an incomplete statistic, from year 1997-2003, China has launched about 151.27million US$ as outlay for scientific research on global change, which helped support 240 important projects on global change. And the research fields embodied the atmosphere, land, and ocean by scientists, professors and project managers from 50 plus scientific research departments and universities. By the end of year 2003, 44 projects have been accomplished, which highlights the visibility of China efforts to the international global change research and the domestic needs of China .

Our country has built up a batch of national key national and open branch labs successively in the past 10 years , and updated some equipments used in experiment, observation, analysis, test, calculation, simulation etc. At present, there are more than 40 key national and open branch labs closely related to global change research , which a lot of great projects rely on to make a mighty advance.

In the involved realms to global change research, the followings departments or stations can be utilized as the observing and research base of relevant projects, namely the wild field station of CAS , China National Meteorological Bureau and China National Oceanic Bureau, the observing station network under China National Bureau of Environmental Protection, and the orientation research station of forestry ecological system under the National Ministry of Forestry. What we have to make special remark here is the “China Ecological system research network”(CERN) of CAS with a financing of RMB200,000,000 Yuan. It has already aroused a broad attention from many foreign experts with its remarkable scale, structure and function.

Facing new challenges of global change and human′s requirements for sustainable development, global change research is converting to applied area from pure basic research in understanding earth system rules, particularly in regional impact on global change. Today, human′s adaptation to global change has been put forward , with synthesis approach.