The 10 Years Sino-German Yangtze Research Cooperation Parallel Workshops, jointly sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Sino-German Center for Research Promotion and Stiftung Mercator, and jointly organized by National Climate Center, Institute of Hydrobiology (CAS), China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) and Changjiang Water Resources Protection Institute, was held from Oct. 24 to 30, 2009 in Wuhan.

The workshop consisted of five sessions, i.e., climate change, floods and droughts; assessment of freshwater ecosystems under global change; climate, energy, and economy modeling, land use change, landslide, soil erosion; environmental impacts of the Yangtze Three Gorges project: water quality aspects. The workshop was also supported by the event series “Deutschland und China – gemeinsam in Bewegung”, which is an initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs and under participation of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Experts from China and Germany made keynote speeches covering areas including Sino-German scientific and technological cooperation, environmental protection of the Three Gorges Project, objectives and progress in Sino-German Yangtze research programs, 20 years’ Sino-German cooperative research on climate change, floods and droughts, the background of Sino-German cooperative project “EcoChange”, etc.

Workshops were held by each organizer, displaying the huge efforts that both Chinese and German scientists made to tackle global environmental issues. These parallel workshops particularly focused on the dynamic characteristics of environmental issues and transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to cope with environmental problems. After the workshop, each organizer conduct field survey according to different cooperative objectives.