China News Service, Beijing, October 19 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Relying on the International Research Center for Sustainable Development Big Data built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the International Research Center for Sustainable Development Big Data officially released the "Global Sustainable Development Data Products (2025)" in Beijing on October 19, using open and shared observation data to help United Nations member states carry out sustainable development goal assessments and bridge the gap in the uneven distribution of global data capabilities.
The 2026 International Science Council Mid-Term General Meeting and Beijing Science Dialogue opened in the afternoon. Representatives of scientific and technological workers from all over the world gathered together to conduct a dialogue around the theme of "Science in a Complex World - Science for a Better Future". "Global Sustainable Development Data Products (2025)" is one of the five scientific research results released at the meeting.
The longest span spans 38 years and the resolution is up to 10 meters.
The observation scope of "Global Sustainable Development Data Products (2025)" covers the land surface, offshore and atmosphere, involving land use, water cycle, ecological restoration, marine aquaculture, industrial activities, human settlements health and other directions. It covers zero hunger, clean drinking water, climate action, underwater life, terrestrial life and other sustainable development goals, and can directly serve the quantitative measurement of specific indicators such as sustainable food production, aquatic ecosystem protection, and desertification prevention.
"Global Sustainable Development Data Products (2025)" consists of 9 sets of data products. The longest time series spans up to 38 years, the spatial resolution is up to 10 meters, and the time resolution is as fine as an hour. It can not only trace back the evolution trend for decades, but also identify mangrove patches and even subtle ecological elements such as tidal ditches and forest windows. It provides standardized, quantifiable, and traceable scientific support for global sustainable development performance assessment and transnational collaborative governance.
Among them, the global surface soil moisture product uses Chinese domestic satellites as the main data source, opening up a complete link from data acquisition, algorithm inversion to product release, and providing global daily soil moisture data with a resolution of 1 km.
Global industrial heat source products use the same set of algorithms to complete global coverage, allowing industrial activities in various countries to have a comparable basis with a unified caliber.
The Global Human Heat Stress Index product advances the evaluation scale from ambient temperature to the actual heat load endured by the human body, and builds a global data set with high spatial and temporal resolution, precise and continuous time series from 2000 to 2024.
The other six sets of data products released simultaneously have their own focuses:
The global 30-meter fine land cover dynamic update product uses continuous change monitoring technology to reveal the spatial pattern and spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of the global land surface from 1985 to 2022.
The global mangrove 10-meter resolution spatial distribution product realizes the leap from spatial distribution identification to landscape structure analysis, completing mangrove patch-level fine identification and accurate expression of spatial structure.
The global afforestation annual monitoring product records the year and spatial distribution of artificial afforestation year by year, dynamically reflecting the global afforestation process, and is an important natural solution to address climate change and mitigate land degradation.
Global marine raft culture 30-meter resolution time series product depicts the spatial distribution characteristics of offshore raft culture and its development trend from rapid expansion to stable development over the past ten years.
Global aerosol optical depth products and global latent heat flux products are derived from China's Fengyun-3 satellite, and together constitute China's domestic satellite quantitative remote sensing product system, respectively supporting atmospheric environment evolution analysis and land surface energy and moisture exchange research.
Fully demonstrate the actual results of open sharing
Guo Huadong, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the International Research Center for Big Data for Sustainable Development, pointed out at the launch site that currently, the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has entered a critical period of implementation, but global governance still faces prominent data bottlenecks.
At the same time, the core contradiction of global sustainable development governance has changed from "insufficient total data" in the past to "unequal distribution of data capabilities." Areas with fragile ecology, lagging development, and the most urgent need for scientific monitoring support often lack independent observation methods. The value of big earth data lies in its ability to bridge this capability gap.
He said that the data products of the International Research Center for Big Data for Sustainable Development are not only widely used by scientific researchers in developed countries, but also frequently downloaded by users in developing countries, which fully demonstrates the actual effectiveness of open sharing.
It is reported that as the world's first international scientific research institution to use big data to serve the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the International Research Center for Sustainable Development Big Data has continued to iterate on the spectrum of sustainable development data products since its establishment in 2021, from global ecology and water resources monitoring to special results in the African region, and continues to export universal scientific public products to the international community.
The International Research Center for Big Data for Sustainable Development has always adhered to an open sharing mechanism and has opened multidisciplinary scientific data to 174 countries and regions around the world. In the future, the center will continue to iterate the global sustainable development data product system, deepen research on multi-source data fusion, artificial intelligence analysis and scenario simulation technology, and transform China's scientific and technological accumulation in the field of earth observation into international public goods that benefit the world.
