On the occasion of the upcoming UN climate change summit, Chinese government donated the GlobeLand30 datasets to the United Nations at the UN Headquarters in New York on 22 September 2014. H.E. Mr. Zhang Gaoli, Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China handed over the GlobeLand30 datasets to the Secretary-General, H.E. Mr. Ban Ki-moon as China’s contribution to the global cause of sustainable development and combating climate change.

This hand over was accompanied by the signing of a Joint Declaration on the China/UN cooperation in the field of Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM), between Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, Mr. WU Hongbo and Ambassador Liu Jieyi, Permanent Representative of the People’s Republic of China, on behalf of the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geo-information (NASG) of China.

As Secretary-General stated in his remarks, this donation is very timely and precious. “Tomorrow global leaders will gather at the United Nations to participate in the Climate Change Summit and to confirm their commitments to action. These detailed data sets will help us to better understand, monitor and manage changes in land cover and land use all over our planet.”

For the past four years, China NASG has developed and prepared GlobeLand30, the world’s first global land cover datasets at a 30m resolution, for the years 2000 and 2010. The datasets are organized by ten major land cover classes and provide essential high resolution land cover and change information for climate change studies, environment monitoring, resource management, sustainable development, and many other societal benefit areas. These global datasets will be freely available to Member States and the international community to assist in their scientific decision-making, and to measure and monitor critical environmental components of the SDGs and post-2015 development agenda.

China, through the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation (NASG) is a strategic regional and global leader in the area of geospatial information, and is a strong supporter and co-Chair of the UN Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM), established by ECOSOC in July 2011. NASG will host the Third High Level Forum on UN-GGIM at its headquarters in Beijing, 22-24 October 2014, with the theme ‘Sustainable Development with Geospatial Information’.