From November 5 to November 9, 2025, the 6th Asian Conference on Geography was held in New Delhi, India. The theme of this conference was "Climate Change, Urbanization and Sustainable Resource Management in Asian Countries". The event was organized by the Asian Geographical Association (AGA) and hosted by Jamia Millia Islamia. More than 400 experts and representatives from universities and research institutes across Asian countries attended the meeting for academic exchange.
Xie Yaowen,Gong Jie, andJiao Jizongfrom the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lanzhou University, attended the conference and engaged in academic discussions. Among them, Prof. Gong Jie delivered a keynote report titled "Spatiotemporal Changes of Urban Impervious Surfaces in Asia and the Enhancement and Adaptation of Urban Heat Island Effects". Prof. Xie Yaowen conducted poster exchanges on "Changes in Grassland Utilization Intensity in the Siling Co Region of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau over the Past 20 Years", and Professor-level Senior Engineer Jiao Jizong presented a poster on "Response of Carbon Oxide Emissions from Grassland Ecosystems on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to Climate Change".
Prof. Gong Jie's report constructed a new framework for dynamic impervious surface extraction integrating machine learning and time series optimization. By integrating multi-source features, zoning strategies, and logical correction algorithms, the study revealed the evolution of impervious surfaces during urban renewal and their multi-scale spatiotemporal thermal responses. It analyzed the thermal environment differences of impervious surface trajectories under contexts such as day-night cycles and seasons. The study confirmed the gradient effect between impervious surface trajectories and thermal environment changes, noting that in areas of increase, the daytime warming rate reached as high as 0.1057 ℃/year. The asymmetric surface warming effect between day and night and across seasons was found to be most intense during the daytime in summer and spring. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of climatic zones clarified the response differences between arid regions and other climatic zones.
Group Photo of the Chinese Delegation; second from the right is Zhang Xuanzi, Secretary and Treasurer of the Asian Geographical Association
On the sidelines of the conference, the delegation from our school also visited Jamia Millia Islamia, where they held discussions on the development of the geography discipline and explored potential areas for cooperation.
About the Asian Conference on Geography: The Asian Conference on Geography is a grand academic event in the field of geography in the Asian region. It was initiated and founded by the Geographical Society of China. Six sessions have been held successively in Shanghai, China (2015), Sapporo, Japan (2016), Jeju, South Korea (2017), Guangzhou, China (2018), Thai Nguyen, Vietnam (2022), and New Delhi, India (2025). With the stabilization of the conference mechanism and the expansion of its scale, under the initiative of the Geographical Society of China and with the active promotion of geographical societies from various countries, geographical societies and institutions from 23 Asian countries and regions jointly initiated the establishment of the Asian Geographical Association during the 4th Asian Conference on Geography. In 2019, the Council of the Asian Geographical Association voted to elect Academician Qin Dahe of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as the first president. The secretariat is attached to the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Geographical Society of China is responsible for the daily work of the association.
