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The 8^th Digital Earth Summit was successfully held online from 30^th November to 2^nd December 2020. The Summit with the theme of “Digital Earth in a Changed World: Challenges and Opportunities” was organized by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) and hosted by Neogeography Group (Protvino Technopark, Russia) and the Department of Geoinformatics, University of Salzburg (Austria). More than 300 people from 70 countries participated to the Summit and 24 invited speakers gave presentations.

At the opening ceremony on the first day, the President of ISDE, Dr. Alessandro Annoni, joint with Dr. Yuri Baturin and Local Organizing Committee Chair Dr. Eugene Eremchenko delivered opening remarks.

The whole Summit included six sessions. On 30^th November, Dr. Alessandro Annoni moderated the Session1 “Digital Earth 2030: What is new“ and started the session with a presentation of “Digital Earth Vision towards 2030”, followed by four keynote speakers’ presentations. Session 2 moderated by Dr. Mario Hernandez focused on “Digital Governance and Ethics”. On 1^st December, Drs. Sven Shade and Luis Perez-Mora moderated the Session 3 “Digital Earth: Citizen Engagement” which explored how Digital Earth empowers people to improve social and planetary well-being. Session 4 “Digital Earth: Education and Capacity Building” was moderated by Prof. Josef Strobl with five keynote presentations. On the last day, in the Session 5, a panel discussion focusing on “Relevance of Digital Earth to support UN SDGs by 2030” was moderated by Dr. Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse. The Honorary President of ISDE, Prof. Huadong Guo joint with other six invited speakers shared their thoughts. Prof. Guo talked about how big Earth data would be in support of the UN SDGs and introduced the new International Research Centre of Big Data for Sustainable Development to be set up in Beijing in 2021. Session 6 moderated by Dr. Yuri Baturin is about “Digital Earth and State Audit” with three invited speakers. For the sessions, all participants were involved by communicating in the chat box with presenters and others.

At the closing ceremony, after Dr. Eugene Eremchenko’s statistic report of the Summit, President Alessandro Annoni summarized the six sessions and proposed five new directions of Digital Earth committed to make ISDE more and more relevant for all stakeholders. ISDE Secretary General Changlin Wang and Executive Director Zhen Liu introduced some future initiatives of ISDE. The ISDE Conference Organizing Award were granted to Eugene and Josef for their contribution to this Summit. At the end, Josef gave a warm invitation to the 12 International Symposium on Digital Earth in Salzburg Austria, in July 2021.

The Digital Earth Summit is one of the series academic events of ISDE. The inaugural summit was held in Auckland in 2006 and following that held every two years. There have been seven summits held in seven countries around the world. Due to the COVID-19, the 8^th Digital Earth Summit which was planned to hold in Moscow Russia was postponed and moved to online platform. Despite a virtual conference, it attracted wide attention through multi-media platforms such as the video streaming.