The Ministry of Natural Resources ("MNR") has recently issued the Outline of the Plan for Innovative Development of Science and Technology for Natural Resources (the "Outline").
The Outline sets a goal of bringing China's capacity for scientific and technological innovations in major fields of natural resources to the forefront in the world and achieving China's leading position in some areas with advantages by the year 2035. Also, China is expected to, at that time, improve its critical and core technologies and equipment used for the survey, monitoring, exploitation and utilization of natural resources, for example, to the world-class level, realize the independent and controllable production thereof by and large, succeed in building an integrated smart regulation platform for natural resources in the sky, space, earth and ocean that is driven by big data and highly intelligent, and raise the contribution rate of science and technology to the business chain for natural resource management to 70 percent, basically modernizing its governance systems and governance capacity for natural resources. To this end, the Outline sets out six major tasks, including "understanding natural resources to lay a solid scientific foundation" and schedules 12 significant science and technology projects, including the "comprehensive observation network project for natural resource elements". Among others, the Outline states that resources for scientific and technological innovations will be integrated effectively through interconnecting national science and technology plans, laying out projects to conquer technical problems and gathering together elements for scientific and technological innovations, in order to release momentum to boost scientific and technological innovations.