Springer Nature initiates China New Development Awards, highlighting Chinese scholars’ contributions to the world’s sustainable development
Beijing, 22 August 2019
Springer Nature today granted China New Development Awards to the Chinese authors of ten scholarly books in recognition of their exceptional contributions to the delivery of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These winning titles were selected from a total of over 800 books published in 2018 by the Springer Nature imprints Springer and Palgrave Macmillan, and authored by China-based researchers. They cover a wide range of discipline areas including social sciences and humanities, business and economics, engineering and technology, as well as life sciences and biomedicine. Two of these winning books focus on China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The full list of the winning titles is as attached.
In September 2015, the 193 Member States of the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, calling for action by all countries to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. One year later, China released its own guidelines to implement the SDGs and made efforts to put into practice a new strategy of “innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared development”.
The 2030 Agenda provides a framework for all governments, businesses, organizations and society to work together to solve the world’s biggest challenges, such as poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and peace and justice. Springer Nature, one of the world’s leading academic publishers, supports delivery of the SDGs through its publishing programme by sharing the discoveries that address the challenges of sustainable development.
“As one of the world’s largest developing countries, and the country with the fastest-growing scientific research in terms of both output and impact, China’s role in facilitating global and regional sustainable development is self-explanatory,” said Nicola Jones, Chairperson of the judging panel for the awards and Head of Publishing, SDG Programme at Springer Nature. “The China New Development Awards, as part of the Springer Nature SDG Programme, further validates how much contribution Chinese scholars have made to China’s and the world’s sustainable development, and enables us to witness how China is transitioning from pursuing high speed growth into high quality development.”
The judging panel for the first China New Development Awards includes Springer Nature in-house editors and executives leading its SDG programme. Each of the ten winning titles involves at least one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and helps to address them in practice.
“The China New Development Awards for academic books, covering a wide range of natural sciences, engineering, social sciences and humanities disciplines, is instrumental in building up interaction across disciplines and tackling some urgent societal challenges, such as global hunger, poverty, or climate change, which cannot be solved relying on one research area. By launching the awards, we also want to better support researchers to gain the wider attention of the policy and business communities who can put research insights into action to solve regional and global issues,” commented Dr. Niels Peter Thomas, Managing Director – Books, Springer Nature.
Academic books are used by authors to summarize and share their long-term research findings at a certain stage of their careers. Compared with journal papers, they are more complete and comprehensive in topic coverage, and are written more systematically. They also feature a longer shelf life; in particular, some classics on fundamental research and works used as textbooks remain long-standing because of their enduring academic and ideological values. Therefore, academic books have their unique role and advantage in helping understand and solve complicated, sustainability issues spanning across different aspects of knowledge.
Around 100 representatives from the research and publishing communities in China joined each other at the prize-giving ceremony for the awards held at this year’s Beijing International Book Fair, where they looked back on and celebrated years of achievements by the Chinese scholars.
Some selected chapters of all these winning books are available for free reading online and downloading until September 30, 2019.
The full list of the winning titles
Title | Authors | Author institution |
Kang Li, Jianhua Zhang, Minyou Chen, Zhile Yang, Qun Niu | ||
Atlas of Environmental Risks Facing China Under Climate Change | Tang Qiuhong, Quansheng Ge | Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS |
Cheng Yu, Song Lilei, Huang Lihe | Tongji University | |
| Xinli Zheng | China Center for International Economic Exchanges | |
Xiaoshan Zhang, Zhou Li | Rural Development Institute, CASS | |
Wu Deng, Ali Cheshmehzangi | University of Nottingham Ningbo China | |
Wuhong Wang, Klaus Bengler, Xiaobei Jiang | Beijing Institute of Technology; Technical University of Munich | |
Linqi Zhang, Sharon R. Lewin | Comprehensive AIDS Research Center, School of Medicine Tsinghua University | |
Wenhua Shan, Kimmo Nutio, Kangle Zhang | Xi'an Jiaotong University; University of Helsinki | |
Jianzhuang Xiao | Tongji University |
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Zhang Li
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