The Fudan Tyndall Centre represents an active research partnership between Fudan University and The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK.  Its purpose is to integrate the excellent discipline-based skills of Fudan University and the interdisciplinary experience and platforms of the UK-based Tyndall Centre to provide, within a single centre, the wide and deep interdisciplinarity required to provide high quality research and effective policy-relevant information to address the challenges China faces in climate and related environmental change. The degree of existing and agreed collaborative work qualifies the activity for the designation of International Joint Centre; which will further stimulate and assist the Centre by explicitly acknowledge that these challenges also have inextricably-connected  international dimensions - physical and social. The international partnership accepts that these dimensions are complex, not least in the international political sphere,  since the historical responsibility for the atmosphere’s greenhouse gas burden lies with other countries (including the UK) and China is at the stage of enormous and necessary transition.

The Tyndall Centre was established by three UK Research Councils and a Government Department in 2000 as the UK’s National Centre for indentifying sustainable options to climate change. It is led by the University of East Anglia (UEA), and formally includes the universities of Cambridge, Cardiff, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Southampton and Sussex. It was established as a formal partnership because of the need to utilise and fuse the best of physical sciences, environmental sciences, economics, social sciences, and engineering/technology in order to best identify sustainable options for climate change; this necessarily also involved better understanding the nature of climate and related climate change and their consequences.