Establishment of a Sino-Norwegian Green platform to tackle environmental challenges and soil and water pollution in Chinese agriculture

China is rapidly moving forward in science, and becoming a worldwide priority partner. Unfortunately, Norway is lagging behind as a consequence of the political constrains between China and Norway. However, Bioforsk has during the recent years been able t o establish and develop important relations and scientific cooperation within key areas linked to food security, environment and sustainability, - both at provincial level and national level in China. The provincial level is based on the Heilongjiang prov ince, which is one of the key regions in terms of Chinas food supply, - whereas the national level is based on the cooperation with the China Academy of Agricultural Science (CAAS) in Beijing which is part of the Ministry of Agriculture. Into this networ k is also included the National Institute of Hybrid Rice, which is the institution of one of the candidates of the Nobel Peace Prize 2014. Up to date, our success in China-collaboration could be summarized as those areas: (i) capacity building: PhD studen ts from HAAS to Bioforsk, scientific visits from both sides; (ii) Research activities with two Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) financed projects; (iii) Knowledge dissemination by publishing two Special Issue on environment and potato research wi th HAAS colleagues; (iv) Two Horizon 2020 proposals with both CAAS and HAAS on environment and integrated disease and pest management (IPM) and (v) A Sino-Norwegian workshop on reducing soil and water pollution and enhancing the rice production by IPM an d science-based strategy. Bioforsk is thus trying to establish a structured platform in order to make the above described network and R&D focuses a strategic instrument for strengthening Norway-China relations through scientific cooperation in key areas such as food security and sustainability. This funding is hence very important for Bioforsk to establish the structured platform and to tackle the global environmental challenges by joint efforts of Norway and China