2025 marks the 10th anniversary of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) give the world a clear, inclusive, and actionable plan to create a healthier planet and more just societies, for this generation and the next. SDGs also provide a universal framework to address the world's most pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges by 2030. 

Unfortunately, despite a decade of efforts, the world still faces numerous difficulties on the path to achieving these goals. Deeper cooperation, research and innovation and digital technologies represented by Earth observation, big data, artificial intelligence and integrated access, processing and analysis of data, are capable of bringing about innovative changes in multiple aspects of SDG monitoring and evaluation. They also drive the formulation and implementation of integrated solutions to sustainable development challenges across sectors and regions.

Following a successful cooperation in the context of the Global Open Science Cloud initiative launched by China Science and Technology Cloud with seeding funding from the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS), EGI and the Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) of CAS agreed to deepen their collaboration to further pursue alignment, interoperability and integration of their technical infrastructures at the service of the scientific frontiers and the society, such as the SDGs. 

A work plan defining coordinated actions for human capacity building, data and compute infrastructure integration, and research and development was established, and EGI and CNIC expressed their commitment to such a work plan in a collaboration agreement that was signed on Friday, 06 September, in Beijing. 

"The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are important because they provide a universal framework to address the world's most pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges. With 2030 approaching, integrated infrastructures providing access to key research datasets and computing are urgently needed to support researchers, policymakers, industry and practitioners from around the globe to explore how to innovatively leverage digital technologies to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs. The coordinated actions of EGI and CNIC are a necessary milestone to unite our resources, expertise and digital capabilities, injecting new momentum and wisdom into global sustainable development. To achieve this, EGI will leverage the contribution of its federation members and the collaboration with the ENVRI community in Europe that brings together environmental research infrastructures (RIs) across different domains (atmosphere, marine, biosphere, and solid Earth) to provide integrated, high-quality environmental data and services" said Tiziana Ferrari, EGI Foundation Director, who recently introduced the example of ENVRI-Hub NEXT at FBAS 2025 in Beijing.

"Our cooperation with EGI started five years ago to support co-development of open science clouds based on China Science and Technology Cloud (CSTCloud), an e-infrastructure for scientific research constructed and operated by our centre. Together with EGI, CSTCloud supported the construction of a cross-continental cloud testbed for the sharing of open science resources and the construction of a collaborative environment among user communities of EGI and CSTCloud. We will work with EGI to support interoperability between technical infrastructures for international cooperation, such as SDGs and other topics", said Long Chun, Deputy Director, CNIC of CAS.