IAHR President Prof. Philippe Gourbesville was interviewed by the China Global Television Network (CGTN), a multi-language and multi-platform Chinese media grouping formerly known as CCTV, on the 24th China-EU Summit that finished on December 7, 2023. Below are the transcripts taken from the interview page on CGTN, where the interview video is also available.

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Europe and China are two important industrial hubs in the world, and it's quite natural that everyone is trying to de-carbonize industrial activities in those two major centers. Chinese people are also becoming very concerned with their living environment and the climate generally speaking. So they are willing to have a better quality within their living environment and obviously this cooperation is becoming extremely natural between the two regions. 

I would like just to take the example of the French cooperation with China, with a new initiative, which is for this new carbon neutrality centers, which has been established between France and China. This is the example of the active cooperation which is engaging not only the research and the scientific community, but also the industrial sectors which is committed from the two countries to work together for developing the right solution that we need urgently to tackle this problem of climate change. 

We can of course try to improve the cooperation between the two regions of the world, especially for the energy production. A roughly thirty percent of the CO2 emissions are linked to the production of energy, which is for electricity, heating, and so on. Hydrogen field is big sector where we can increase our cooperation between the two regions of the world. But we need to find a good solution for producing with, low impact, minimum impact on the electricity we need for the hydrogen production. 

There is another aspect which is natural restoration of the natural environment. Improving quality of the environment, restoring rivers, restoring shoreline, restoring marine environment is extremely important to try to reduce emissions, but also to store carbon emissions that are produced by human activities. 

There are tremendous achievement in China over the last twenty years regarding the water quality, especially restoration of the rivers, lakes and coastal era. And we see the quality of those on government strongly improving. So this is something which is very successful and that can be demonstrated at the international scale. Those progresses have been recorded also in Europe, but the magnitude of the effort in China is really is really massive. And this is it's also a very nice demonstration that the right willingness with the right strategy, those things can be achieved.

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» Visit the interview page on CGTN to watch the interview video and also read the full report.