To achieve sustainable development, the understanding of impact of global environmental change on renewable resources and disaster frequency, strength and spatial-temporal pattern should be strengthened. In recent years, severe disasters have caused catastrophes all over the world, such as the freezing rain and snowstorm disaster that happened in China in 2008, Typhoon Sidr in Bangladesh in 2007, and Hurricane Katrina in the US in 2005. Strengthening the study of integrated disaster risk governance under the background of global environmental change has become a pressing problem of sustainable development. Supported by CNC-IHDP, the CNC-IHDP-RG workgroup proposed to the IHDP to launch a new international research project on integrated risk governance in the context of global environmental change in 2006. After two years′ efforts, the IRG Project is now accepted by IHDP-SSC to be the new core Scientific Program and it will be formally launched during the IHDP Open Science Conference held in Bonn, Germany in April, 2009. This core project will build a platform for top level researchers, government policy makers and practitioners in risk governance to exchange ideas, theories and methodologies. The research foci of this core project will be on the issues of science, technology and management of integrated disaster risk governance based on the case comparisons around the world. It is the goal of the project to make the innovations in concepts, theories and methodologies of integrated disaster risk governance, which could be useful and applied to practices of integrated disaster reduction in the real world. By proposing, preparing and organizing this important international cooperative project, it is helpful not only to promote the research results made by Chinese risk governance research community, but also to raise Chinese global environmental change research community in a highly respected position internationally.