Development and prospects of environmental geoscience

Abstract

Outbreaks of infectious viruses, ecosystem degradation, and environmental pollution are more serious than ever before. “Sustainable development” and “livable earth” have become global development trends. However, these concepts are difficult to achieve scientifically, creating new opportunities and challenges for the development of environmental geoscience. Environmental geoscience takes the Earth’s surface system as its object of research, and includes the atmosphere, hydrosphere, surface lithosphere, pedosphere, and biosphere. This discipline studies the causes and formation mechanisms of, and solutions to, environmental, health, ecological, and disaster problems based on major environmental issues from the perspective of earth system science. The goals of environmental geoscience are to serve the needs of major national science and technology, respond to increasingly prominent ecological and environmental problems, and achieve balance between sustainable societal development and environmental protection. Based on discipline strategy research, this paper connects the top-level strategic design of “Livable Earth-Earth System Science” of the Department of Earth Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China, explores and summarizes the concepts and extension of environmental geoscience, and analyzes the demands for discipline development from the perspectives of national environmental issues and international scientific frontiers. The paper pays specific attention to the development of environmental geoscience as a means to the realization of sustainable development of China, the scientific basis for the improvement of national policies, laws, and regulations concerning the protection of ecosystems and the environment, and the scientific support for the improvement of China’s international influence in the field of environmental care and management. In addition, the paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the development trends, development status, and current problems facing environmental geoscience. Chinese scholars in the field of environmental geosciences have produced 3074 research papers, which is fewer than the number published by scholars in the United States but three times that of German scholars, who are the third most published scholars in the world. This bibliometric analysis finds that Chinese research is slightly less influential than the world average. This suggests a number of problems that need to be addressed: (1) A satisfactory quantity of research papers is not matched by satisfactory quality; (2) the development of each subdiscipline within the field is unbalanced; (3) compared to developed countries, China has few research institutions of excellence; and (4) substantial improvements are needed in the development of comprehensive problem-solving capabilities using knowledge from a variety of disciplines and through the development of large databases and observation platforms. Therefore, environmental geoscience needs to be developed further to resolve environmental, ecological, disaster, and health problems relating to human survival and development, to integrate different disciplinary approaches to solve comprehensive problems, to promote disciplinary advancement with the use of new technologies, methods, and perspectives, and to explore new laws through systematic, information-based and quantitative big data mining. Based on the current situation, the paper also proposes suggestions for the optimization of the subject layout and the adjustment of subject codes that can be used in 2021. Finally, based on the strategic research results, environmental geoscience development priorities for the next <sc>5–10 years</sc> are described, including interdisciplinarity within environmental geoscience sub-disciplines and between environmental geosciences and other disciplines. The proposed development priorities are conducive to engaging with related scientific researchers.