Remote sensing for China's sustainable development: opportunities and challenges

For sustainable development, China must deal with a lot of significant major issues, such as resource shortage, environmental deterioration, ocean exploitation, climate change, and so on. As the acceleration of global economic integration process, we have to study and resolve these resource and environment problems with global view. Remote sensing is the unique and basic global observation technology to support the sustainable development, due to its advantages of synoptic view and dynamic monitoring capability for the earth system science, environmental science, resource science and global change study. After a short review of the remote sensing development history, the major international earth observation programs for human sustainable development and global change are summarized and the Chinese remote sensing technology and application status is analyzed accordingly. The most important five remote sensing frontier and challenge directions are presented as the Global Earth Observation System of Systems(GEOSS), high performance remote sensing modeling and inversion, quantitative remote sensing product validation theory and platform, earth system model and remote sensing data assimilation, and remote sensing big data science. Finally, we point out that the remote sensing application service model should be innovated for much better services on sustainable development, global strategy and economic development. The high-resolution remote sensing satellite commercialization, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) remote sensing development, and the remote sensing application marketization should be encouraged. © 2016, Science Press. All right reserved.