On February 15th, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office H.E. Alok Sharma and his delegation visited Institute of Urban Environment (IUE), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
ZHU Yongguan, Director General of IUE, expressed warm welcome to the distinguished guests. Firstly, he accompanied the delegation to visit Sino-UK joint environmental laboratory in IUE and introduced key scientific research carried out there to the guests. He said, he was very glad to witness many great achievements had acquired through China-UK collaboration in the past few years. In addition, he detailed the specific research on antibiotic resistance and soil remediation which has much cooperation with UK.
Subsequently, both sides had a meeting. In the beginning of the meeting, Director ZHU gave a brief introduction about IUE and also reviewed the accomplishments IUE have made. He noted that in the past few years, IUE actively pushed forward to cooperate with UK. We established UK-China Centre for International Research and Innovation on the Environment (I-RICE) with Lancaster University and Sino-UK Joint Institute of Environment Technology with the University of Aberdeen, besides, we signed Memorandum of Understanding with University of East Anglia and Center for Ecology & Hydrology and so on, meanwhile, IUE organized several international academic conferences with UK which strengthened the ties with UK, he said.
Mr. Alok Sharma affirmed the significant contribution of Director ZHU on building the bridge for China-UK cooperation, and he inquired in detail of a series of research in the fields of soil, water and atmosphere which is undertaken in IUE. He also looked forward to further strengthening the in-depth cooperation between China and UK through the support of Newton fund. Finally, Director ZHU proposed to establish a joint platform to combine government, scientific institution, enterprise and financial institution in order to make the cooperation more effectively and smoothly. Mr. Alok Sharma was very interested in this idea, he advised Director ZHU to write a draft then he would help to submit to the British government to promote the joint platform construction, thus to achieve the leap development of the Sino-UK cooperation.
LUO Guansheng, Deputy Inspector of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Fujian Provincial People’s Government, representatives from Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of Xiamen Municipal Government, Bureau of International Co-operation Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Branch, was accompanied by investigation.
