The Earth is an ever-changing planet, when some species (human) has the capacity to change its environment from the global scale, the Earth starts to enter a unique development stage. To seek better development, the human is changing and destroying the existing living environment to varying degrees. The current world is facing a series of unprecedented major global environmental problems: the shortage of clean fresh water, land and aquatic ecosystem degradation, deteriorated soil erosion, destruction of biodiversity, changes in chemical nature of the atmosphere, fisheries production decline, the global climate is likely to undergo great changes. These changes in the Earth's environment have gone beyond the scope of natural changes of the Earth itself, like war, poverty, disease, malnutrition and other catastrophes, they pose threats to the survival of mankind.

The Earth is an ever-changing planet, when some species (human) has the capacity to change its environment from the global scale, the Earth starts to enter a unique development stage. To seek better development, the human is changing and destroying the existing living environment to varying degrees. The current world is facing a series of unprecedented major global environmental problems: the shortage of clean fresh water, land and aquatic ecosystem degradation, deteriorated soil erosion, destruction of biodiversity, changes in chemical nature of the atmosphere, fisheries production decline, the global climate is likely to undergo great changes. These changes in the Earth's environment have gone beyond the scope of natural changes of the Earth itself, like war, poverty, disease, malnutrition and other catastrophes, they pose threats to the survival of mankind.

Beijing Normal University is one of the important scientific research bases in China, and also the only university in the country gathering scientists in different areas to carry out long-term multi-disciplinary crossed global change and Earth system science research and personnel trainings. Beijing Normal University commits to comprehensive integrated research on forefront issues of global change and the Earth system science for a long time, on January 19, 2008, relying on integrated, crossed and systematic multi-disciplinary advantages, on the basis of the original School of Geography and Remote Sensing Science, School of Environment, School of Resources, College of Water Science and College of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management, the university established "College of Global Change and Earth System Science". With State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, High-performance Scientific Computing Center, and a number of key laboratories at ministry (city) level and engineering centers as support platform, at the same time, through establishing innovation teams in cooperation with high level scientific research institutions and scientists at home and abroad, the college forms a research and teaching group with a world-class level and cultivates multi-disciplinary crossed research and application talents with innovation abilities.

The mission of the college is to consider the characteristics of current Earth science development highlighting disciplinary cross and minding comprehensive research, with the Earth system mode and the key scientific issues research as basis, global change integrated observation data platform as support, interference mechanism of human activities and global change as bond and the global change economics as the key breakthrough direction, in line with the requirements of China's national economic and social development on Earth science, to strengthen ability in forecasting global and regional climate and environmental change, with national economy service as the goal, effectively carry out integrated research on global change and Earth system science and build into a world-class scientific research center and innovation talents cultivation base.