Kick-off Meeting of CAS  Advisory and Consulting Project “Development Strategy and Countermeasures in Midwest Mountain Areas of China” was held in Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), CAS on March 2nd, 2013.
 CAS academician SUN Honglie, ZHENG Du, FU Bojie, LIU Congqiang and ZHAI Mingguo，Researcher CHEN Guojie, ZHONG Xianghao were presented at the meeting.

Academician FU introduced the background and general requirements of the project. Dr. DENG Wei, leader of working group, director of Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment (IMHE), CAS reported the importance, objective, mission, version and technology route of this project. Dr. LIU Shaoquan, FANG Yiping and LI Xiubin made detailed work plan report about the key research mountain areas respectively.

Experts made in-depth discussion about the plan of this project. ALL experts agree with the point of view that mountain in China has the following characteristics, large in size, a fragile ecological environment, low level of economic development, and especially a huge number of people and social pressure, and a contradiction between development and preservation. This project will focus on the emergence and strategy problem of mountain development.

Academician SUN said that the research need to focus more on key areas and concentrate more on key problems in mountain resource, environment and human development from macroscopic perspective. Academician FU hoped that researchers should focus on sensitive problem of mountain development and pay highly attention to policy impact on mountain development and grasp the future development direction of mountain development. Academician ZHENG suggested that researchers should take typical area for deep analyzing and find out a possible solution. Academician ZHAI proposed that ecological environment problem and rural public sanitary caused by solid mineral resource exploiting should be paid a special attention. Academician LIU suggested that it is necessary to pay more attention to improve population quality which has a major impact on mountain development. Other experts also put forward some constructive suggestions in the meeting.

After the kick-off meeting, Dr. DENG presided over a work meeting to work out arrangements, timeline and plans of this project.

Over 20 experts from IMHE, IGSNRR, Research Center for Eco-Environment Sciences, CAS, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, CAS, Northwest A&F University, and Henan University attended the meeting.