The birth of plate hypothesis last century represents revolution in understanding geo-science, and the similar breakthrough in this century may take place in the science of earth environment. The China-oriented East Asian monsoon-arid environmental system differentiation-coupling process and evolution trend is not only a major scientific issue to which the academic circle pays attention, but also a pressing knowledge demand in national decision-making of resources, environment and diplomatic affairs. In recent 20 years, China made great progress in research of the field and gained important academic position in the world, and faced a series of new major scientific issues at the same time, which become the opportunities and challenges in research of Chinese mainland’s environmental evolution. It will be the key for making further breakthrough to collect continuous environmental record of different sub-systems of environment, gain accurate and reliable chronological control, find out history and the rate of change of monsoon-arid environmental system evolution and closely combine geologic record and mode research to carry out integrated research with the uniform scientific goal, under the frame of surface environmental system with interactions of Asian continent, atmosphere and ocean.  

 　  Based on the above-mentioned thinking, we have gained a series of high resolution environmental records of core, lake, stalagmite and tree ring in different environmental sub-units during execution of “Chinese Mainland Scientific Drilling Project”, as the first-hand valuable information fully reflecting environmental system evolution of Chinese continent. At the same time, international continental drilling project (ICDP) committee has approved and given support to the big international cooperation program of “Qinghai Lake Environmental Drilling and Global Change” with this project’s applicant as chief scientist, providing rare opportunity for China to be leading in the field internationally. This project is mainly based on the above-mentioned environmental records to mainly tackle the following three key scientific issues: 1) How differentiation and coupling process does Asian monsoon-arid environmental system have？and which important development stages have been experienced？which factors have caused the changes？2) What is the evolution history and the rate of change of all sub-units in the monsoon-arid environmental system on different time scales what kind of environmental dynamics mechanism is reflected？3) How does monsoon-arid environmental system transition response to and influence global environmental change？What will the trend of development be in the future？

　  Solution to the above-mentioned scientific issue needs to, under uniform scientific goal, enhance quantitative -semi-quantitative research of environmental substitute indexes, systematically recover time-space evolution history of China’s arid and semi-arid environment, and East Asia and South Asia monsoon environment development process and its impact on regional hydrology and bio-diversity evolution, research monsoon-arid environmental system evolution’s dynamics mechanism and its relation with global major geologic-environmental events and estimate the trend of development of monsoon-arid environmental system against the backdrop of global change.

　  In terms of basic theory, the final goal of the project is to integrate existing and new scientific understandings to build a theoretical system of relations between Asian continent environmental system evolution and global change under marine-continent-atmosphere interactions, so as to make contributions to environmental evolution and geo-system science. In terms of national demand, the project will reveal trend of development different regional environmental change and the mode of its responding to global warming, prepare scientific basis for the central government and local governments to formulate countermeasures for sustainable development suitable for global change, and build an international most advanced research team.