Greenhouse Gases Cooperation climate change has become a global issue threatening the survival and development of mankind.

At the end of 2016, the first global carbon dioxide monitoring scientific experiment satellite of China (TanSat) was successfully launched by the Ministry of Science and Technology, China Meteorological Administration and Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the satellite data was shared freely around the world. In order to promote the participation of carbon satellites in global carbon emissions governance and accelerate China-Europe greenhouse gas monitoring cooperation, NRSCC and ESA signed a letter of Cooperation Intention at the ESA headquarters in Paris.

On 16 January 2020, NRSCC and ESA formally signed the Protocol regarding the intended co-ordination of their activities in the Remote Sensing of Greenhouse Gases and Related Missions. With the present Protocol the two sides intend to include TanSat into the ESA Third Party Mission Programme and TanSat data usage within the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) and Earthnet Data Assessment Pilot (EDAP) project. On the principle of reciprocity, ESA intends to provide data from the Sentinel-5P and FLEX missions as well as from CCI and Greenhouse Gases (GHG) missions to NRSCC with the distribution authority as third party through China GEOSS Data Sharing Network. Together the two sides intend to support each other, as needed, at the calibration and validation phases of the TanSat, Sentinel-5P, and FLEX mission.