Abstract:

At the 19th G20 Summit in Brazil in November 2024, China promoted the development of sustainable solutions to climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental pollution. This continued the theme of the 2016 G20 Hangzhou Summit, at which China placed development at the center of the G20’s macroeconomic policy coordination for the first time, adopting the G20 Action Plan on the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the G20 Initiative on Supporting Industrialization in Africa and Least Developed Countries. In Brazil, China announced actions on advancing modernization in Africa over the next three years with a Chinese commitment of RMB360 billion yuan in financial support. In this article, we examine the potential role of geoscience research and practice in development, particularly in the sustainable use of natural resources, the prevention of climate change impacts, as well as mitigation of geo-hazards and their health implications, indicating the areas where China’s geoscience for Africa is strong and where it requires more effort.

We find that although China is the world’s leading publisher of scientific papers, its contribution to geoscience in Africa (the globe’s fastest-growing economic area), as shown by bibliometric research, appears to be rather small and inconsistent with the research priorities of Africa.

Amongst the priorities for geoscience research in Africa, which are not addressed substantially by the research conducted so far, are sustainable mineral and hydrocarbon development, hydrology and hydrogeology, climate change and resilience, natural hazards, medical geology,agrominerals, and geoscience education and training. A particular opportunity for African nations is the presence of critical minerals -minerals needed for the energy transition and for batteries for electric cars in particular. Africa is well-endowed with many of these critical materials, such as rare earth elements and platinum group metals. Several research groups stress the need for the agency on the part of African institutions to map out these valuable resources, understand their value and the economics and sustainability of their extraction, encourage local business, attract investment, and scrutinize proposals from potential international investors to get the best deals.

A strong point of existing China-led geoscience development includes the Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) program online computing platform and its artificial intelligence tool GeoGPT, which is being developed in partnership with Zhejiang Laboratory. These are being developed with strong China funding support for free and wide global access, with a particular focus on Africa. These advanced tools will help to place the agency of development squarely in the hands of African scientists and institutions.

In summary, the following are recommended: (1) a more coordinated and strategic approach to China-led geoscience research in Africa; (2) an Africa-centered, geoscience funding initiative that concentrates on relevant topics to the continent such as critical minerals exploration and other geological resources, materials and processes and their health implications on the populations and ecosystems in general, as well as climate change and climate change resilience; and (3) continued support for China-led international initiatives that seek to increase the agency and capacity of Africa geoscience researchers, for example the Deep-time Digital Earth platform.

Key words: open science, sustainable development, digital empowerment, China-Africa geo-collaboration, Deep-Time Digital Earth