For sustainable development

China must deal with a lot of significant major issues

such as resource shortage

environmental deterioration

ocean exploitation

climate change

and so on. As the acceleration of global economic integration process

we have to study and resolve these resource and environment problems with global view. Remote sensing is the unique and basic global observation technology to support the sustainable development

due to its advantages of synoptic view and dynamic monitoring capability for the earth system science

environmental science

resource science and global change study. After a short review of the remote sensing development history

the major international earth observation programs for human sustainable development and global change are summarized and the Chinese remote sensing technology and application status is analyzed accordingly. The most important five remote sensing frontier and challenge directions are presented as the Global Earth Observation System of Systems（GEOSS）

high performance remote sensing modeling and inversion

quantitative remote sensing product validation theory and platform

earth system model and remote sensing data assimilation

and remote sensing big data science. Finally

we point out that the remote sensing application service model should be innovated for much better services on sustainable development

global strategy and economic development. The high-resolution remote sensing satellite commercialization

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle（UAV） remote sensing development

and the remote sensing application marketization should be encouraged.