GLOCOM is an EU Marie Curie IRSES (International Research Staff Exchange Scheme) project, financed within the EU Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013) under Grant Agreement n. 269233.

The project is coordinated by the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics (DAIS) of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy (Prof. Antonio Marcomini and coworkers), and has involved three others institutes as partners: Umea University, Sweden (Prof. Mats Tysklind and coworkers), the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, China (Dr. Zhang Mengheng and coworkers) and Beijing Normal University, China (Prof. Hao Fanghua and coworkers). The project has also involved researchers from the Department of Asian and North African Studies (DSAAM) of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Prof. Laura de Giorgi and coworkers).

Specifically, in this collaboration:

• Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (UNIVE) has involved its expertise on multicriteria decision analysis, decision support systems and risk assessment;
• Umeå University (UMU) has provided understanding of mobilization processes for persistent organic and inorganic pollutants in soil and ground water;
• Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences (CRAES) has offered its expertise on ecology, risk assessment and management of contaminated site;
• Beijing Normal University (BNU) has offered its expertise on environment risk assessment and characteristic of soil pollution.

This has been done through the organization of several exchange activities in the fields of contaminated soil characterization, environmental risk assessment and decision making processes. These exchange activities aimed to increase quality and mutual benefit of the transfer of knowledge between the involved researchers from EU and China, in particular through the organization of workshops and training sections and the co-participation to conference and scientific publications. In fact the collaboration has been planned with 80 guest stays by experienced and early stage researchers in partner organizations, for a total of 188 months. Each stay has included a series of internal and open workshops and/or training with the purpose of transferring knowledge and identifying common ground for future research. The primary deliverables are joint scientific publications. The developed common research base and contacts made has also laid the foundation for strategic collaborations in future research projects.