The Forum on Global Innovation Hubs and Science Cities, one of the regular activities of the 2024 ZGC Forum, was held recently. The forum was co-sponsored by Tsinghua University and Springer Nature. At the forum, Springer Nature released the Nature Index 2024 Science Cities, a supplement to Nature. The Nature Index showed that Changsha ranked 23rd among global science cities, up seven places from last year.

The supplement noted that Chinese cities, especially provincial capitals, have greatly enhanced their position as globally competitive science centers. In 2023, Beijing remained at the top of the world's top 10 science cities. Chinese cities dominated the Nature Index's list of cities with the fastest growth in overall output between 2022 and 2023. The 10 fastest-growing cities, based on adjusted share changes, were all located in China, with Changsha being one of them.

The Nature Index is compiled by the Nature Research Intelligence, part of Springer Nature. The Nature Index 2024 Science Cities explores current global science trends by focusing on the scientific research output of major cities and metropolitan areas in journals tracked by the Nature Index in 2023.

Last year, "Building Changsha into a Global R&D Center City" was listed as one of the landmark projects aimed to "build a sci-tech innovation hub with core competitiveness", and Changsha pressed ahead with all-out efforts to make new progress and new achievements in sci-tech innovation. In 2023, Changsha's whole-society R&D investment intensity, measured by the ratio of R&D investment to GDP, increased to 3.3%, and the city won 13 national science and technology awards, ranking 7th in the country. Since it begun the construction of a global R&D center city, Changsha has made breakthroughs in 76 key technologies, with the technology contract turnover reaching 178.59 billion CNY. In particular, the locally commercialized rate of technology development, transfer, and license contracts is 51.6%. There are more than 3,000 innovation platforms in Changsha. Changsha climbed from 37th last year to 32nd this year on the 2024 global list of top 100 science and technology clusters released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

This article is from the Hunan Provincial Government www.enghunan.gov.cn.

Translator: Kuang Zhenzhen

Chinese source: Changsha Evening News