On May 7, 2021, the mid-term meeting of the National Key R&D Project "Site Soil Environmental Damage Assessment Methods and Standards" was held offline at the Institute of Applied Ecology (IAE), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and in the form of web conferencing.  

More than 70 people attended the meeting, including the project's chief scientist, Prof. Guo Jinghai, the project's co-principal investigators and technical back bones, IAE's administrators, and the specially invited experts for project review (Zhou Lianbi from Beijing Mining and Metallurgical Technology Group Co., Ltd., Lin Yusuo from Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, Prof. Sun Chunbao of the University of Science and Technology Beijing, the IAE's Prof. Zhang Xudong and Prof. Jia Yongfeng, and others). 

Wang Xugao, head of the IAE's Science and Technology Division, presided at the meeting. Zhuo Junchen, deputy director of IAE, expressed welcome and gratitude to the participants of the meeting. 

Professor Zhu Jinghai, gave an overall report on the work process of the project. Then, the co-PIs of the project gave reports. Afterwards, the project review experts conducted full and in-depth discussions and exchanges. They affirmed that the project developed a dynamic health risk assessment and early warning system for soil pollution in construction land and a compensation cost accounting system for pollution damage, both of which are excellent systems. They also put forward suggestions on improving innovativeness of the project, and provided guidance for dealing with the project's shortcomings. For example, they believed that the overall workload of the entire project is a bit heavy. So they proposed that the six sub-projects should be integrated better to highlight the project's feature and core contents, so as to facilitate the completion of various tasks of the project. In addition, the review experts suggested that the project team reasonably control project expenses, and make innovative achievements to take the lead in the field of site soil evaluation. 

This meeting will play a positive role in the subsequent mid-term project inspection and the orderly advancement of the project.