PRESS RELEASES

14 September 2021

Springer Nature today announced 10 English-language academic books are the winners of this year’s "China New Development Awards" in its effort to highlight significant research contributions from Chinese scholars in facilitating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. The full list of the winning titles is provided in the attached table. These award-winning books also demonstrate how Springer Nature, a leading publisher of SDG-related research, is helping to address global societal challenges and accelerate delivery of the SDGs by publishing and disseminating high-quality books with content relevant to the goals.

Springer Nature initiated the awards in 2019. This year's winning books were all selected from about 820 books and conference proceedings published in 2020 by Springer and Palgrave Macmillan, two of Springer Nature’s renowned imprints. Each book is edited or authored by at least one Chinese scholar and directly linked to one or more of the 17 SDGs, covering hot topics across a wide range of disciplines from environmental sciences, pedagogy, medicine, to social sciences, business and economics.

Five of the winning titles focus on the challenges emerging in the process of urbanization, such as those related to urban water environments, the impact of human activities on water resources, rural development, big data prediction and smart cities, migrating population and infectious diseases, etc. Two books focus on China’s economic rise and the Sino-US trade conflicts amid evolving globalization. Another three winning books feature the global education policies, China's wind power industry and circular economy.

Dr. Niels Peter Thomas, President of Greater China and Managing Director Books, Springer Nature, said: "Just as the response to the Covid-19 pandemic calls for global collaboration, the key to addressing all these global societal challenges lies in collaboration. This is not only interdisciplinary collaboration, but also collaboration between different countries, as well as between the research community and the political and business communities. Springer Nature has a clear strategy to make positive changes to the world and serve as a bridge for collaborations, leveraging the content of papers and books we publish."

The trend of scientific collaboration is fully reflected in the content of the winning titles. Compared with previous years, many more of the books include research across disciplines such as medicine, geography, and social sciences, further revealing the urgent societal challenges can only be solved through multidisciplinary approaches. And more than half of the winning books were authored or edited by Chinese scholars in collaboration with international colleagues who are together responding to these challenges with combined wisdom. 

The China New Development Awards, as part of the Springer Nature SDG Programme, aims to accelerate the delivery of SDGs by sharing relevant discoveries. Since the SDGs were launched in 2015, Springer Nature has published more than 300,000 relevant articles or book chapters, which collectively have been downloaded more than 725 million times. Between 2015 and 2020, the volume of SDG-relevant content published by Springer Nature increased by more than 72%. In 2020, Springer Nature became an early signatory of the UN SDG Publishers Compact.

In a video keynote speech celebrating the awards, Prof. Yansui Liu, Director of the Key Laboratory of Regional Sustainable Development Modeling, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: “In order to build up scientific collaboration in sustainability and increase strategic consensus, we shall bring into full play the role of international scientific organizations or institutions to boost extensive cooperation and exchange of expertise. With its ‘SDG programme’, Springer Nature has provided a more valued and efficient international platform in support of such effort.”

The awards are assessed by a judging panel made up of Springer Nature’s in-house editors and executives leading its SDG programme, on the basis of both scientific merits and the social impact of research.

Some selected chapters of all the winning books are available for free reading online and downloading until October 30th, 2021. For more information about the awards and the winning books, please view the special webpage.

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The full list of the 2020 winning titles
 

About Springer Nature

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Contact

Zhiang Li | Communications | Springer Nature
li.zhang@springernature.com