An outstanding example of cooperation between Arctic and non-Arctic countries in cryosphere and climate research: Sino-Finnish cooperation for more than 30 years

The cryosphere is interconnected with other components of the climate system through global exchange of water, energy, and carbon. Long-term sustainable and pragmatic scientific and technological cooperation on the cryosphere and climatology in polar and sub-polar regions between China and Finland began in the 1980s. The fields of bilateral cooperation include joint training of young scientists, joint field observations, climatological and ecological researches of polar and sub-polar sea ice, glaciers and frozen lakes, etc. The year 2020 marked the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Finland. In order to celebrate the great achievements by Chinese and Finnish scientists in the fields of cryosphere and climate research, the Advances in Polar Science invited scientists from both sides to jointly organize a Special Issue entitled “Sino-Finnish cooperation on cryosphere and climatology in polar and sub-polar regions”. In this Special Issue, we have collected 10 papers, with most papers created jointly by scientists of both sides. The fruitful scientific achievement is strongly benefited from the sustainability of cooperation. Monitoring, research, prediction, mitigation, and adaptation to the climate change in the polar and sub-polar regions will definitively stay in the focus for many decades to come. A new era of Finnish-Chinese scientific collaboration on cryosphere has begun