General Information

The International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) was established in response to 1999 Beijing Declaration on Digital Earth and for promoting world-wide development of Digital Earth. Inaugurated in May 2006, ISDE is a non-political, non-governmental and not-for-profit international organization initiated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), principally promoting academic exchange, science and technology innovation, education, and international collaboration towards Digital Earth.

The purpose of ISDE is to promote international cooperation on realizing the vision of Digital Earth, and enable Digital Earth technologies to play key roles in,inter alia, economic and socially-sustainable development, to promote information technology and to reduce digital gap. ISDE will play key role in different aspects of using natural resources, optimizing environment, protecting cultural heritage, improving disaster mitigation ability, global change studies, natural resources conservation and improvement of living standards.

The summit is the academic event of the series conferences of the ISDE, specifically holding discussions in terms of Digital Earth technology, application, regional and national development. The inaugural summit was held in Auckland in 2006 with former Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark opening the event. The biennial Digital Earth Summit continues to unfold an international Digital Earth platform to bear in advancing humanitarian efforts and social development, to scale up programmers and drive innovations and to establish international collaborations for creating the future of Digital Earth worldwide.

Digital Earth Summit: New Zealand (2006), Germany (2008), Bulgaria (2010), New Zealand (2012), Japan (2014).