Abstract:Since the Digital Ea rth concept was put forth in the 19 98, research on Digital Earth has been given great attention internationally. 7 International Symposia on Digital Earth and 4 Digital Earth Summits were initiated and organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the International Society of Digital Earth (ISDE). Two Digital Earth declarations in 1999 and 2009 were produced from these meetings. The first international journal focusing on scientific Digital Earth research was inaugurated as the International Journal of Digital Earth with its editorial office located in Beijing in 2008. More emphasis and efforts have been geared toward Digital Earth applications and functionality, for instance the Digital Earth Prototype Research and the Digital Earth Science Platform of the CAS Digital Earth Key Lab. Undoubtedly, China has played and will continue to play an important role in promoting Digital Ea rth worldwide. On March 2011, the S ecretariat of the ISDE, hosted by the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth of the CAS, organized a “Digital Earth Vision 2020” working group, which included seventeen Digital Earth scientists from Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States. One paper “Next Generation Digital Earth”, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) in 2012, concluded from the working group reviews progress in Digital Earth scientific discovery, analyses current work, and forecasts future developments, which is a new milestone in Digital Earth’s history. The new Digital Earth will act as the geographical framework on which to build solutions to physical, social, and cultural problems, with functionalities of satisfactory metric accuracy, inclusion of underground and underwater data, historical and time predictive models, data archiving, dynamic and interactive, improved access to current and historical data and information, incorporation of inherently non-visual data, metadata on quality, trust and uncertainty, participative in data provision, analysis and debate, includes information on place, culture, identity and networks, development is driven by application demand, and easy to use. The new Digital Earth will continue to bear in advancing humanitarian efforts and social development, to scale up programmers and drive innovations and to establish international collaborations for creating the future of Digital Earth worldwide. The deployment of technology and bold new digital earth vision in the face of problems of the earth has truly changed the way we look at the earth and yielded many benefits. Accompanied by the vision of next-generation Digital Earth, we recommend a “Digital Earth 2030 Discovery” should be unfolded through implementing specific Digital Earth researches, diversifying Digital Earth applications, and carrying out more international cooperation.