Mr. Siddharth Chatterjee and Dr. Stephen Bainous Kargbo of the United Nations (UN) paid a visit to CBAS on January 7 to formally meet with CBAS officials and tour the SDG Big Data Platform. Mr. Chatterjee is the UN Resident Coordinator in China and Dr. Kargbo is the UN Industrial Development Organization's representative to China.

The 2021 Belt and Road Training Course on BeiDou Precise and Intelligent Positioning was opened on January 10 in Nanning, capital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. The opening ceremony has brought more than 40 participants including international students, as well as foreign enterprise and public institution representatives in China.

I am Jean-Louis Roujean from France. My stay in China as a distinguished scientist supported by CAS President's International Fellowship Initiative (PIFI) was a great experience for me. It was indeed a stimulating visit through the fruitful discussions I had with my dear Chinese colleagues and the exploration of different places. Science and culture are for me definitively linked. We cannot collaborate at the international level without better understanding the culture of our dear colleagues.

China-Greece Belt and Road Joint Laboratory on Cultural Heritage Conservation Technology was launched on December 21 at the Palace Museum of China to promote S&T collaboration on cultural heritage protection in both countries.

The 42nd Asian Conference on Remote Sensing (ACRS 2021) was held at Can Tho, Viet Nam from 22 to 24 November 2021 with the theme on "Remote Sensing for Disaster Risk and Resources Degradation Reduction toward Sustainable Development".