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2024.09.30 Successful Bid - The 23rd Annual Meeting of Asia Oceania Geosciences Society - AOGS 2026 - to be held in Fukuoka!

We are pleased to announce that the 23rd Annual Meeting of Asia Oceania Geosciences Society - AOGS 2026 - will be held in Fukuoka, Japan. The Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), in collaboration with JNTO MICE Ambassador Takehiko Satoh, who was appointed as AOGS President at the Council Meeting after AOGS 2024 (held in Pyeongchang,South Korea), Fukuoka Convention & Visitors Bureau (FCVB) and other related parties as Team Japan, contributed to the success of this bid. The conference is expected to attract approximately 4,000 participants, including around 2,500 participants from overseas.

In 2018, Ambassador Satoh and JNTO launched a coordinated campaign to bring the 2022 event to Fukuoka. Fukuoka received a visit by the International Headquarters in 2019, but unfortunately the bid failed. Through this bitter experience and the pandemic, we tried again with a substantially modified proposal.

As part of the process for the successful bid for 2026, a presentation was made by FCVB at the AOGS Council Meeting in March 2024. In addition, after the Japan Geoscience Union Meeting held in late May 2024, the AOGS Secretariat and Ambassador Satoh conducted a site visit to make the final confirmation, including the Marine Messe Fukuoka Hall B, which had not yet opened at the time of the 2019 visit.

Ambassador Satoh made a fresh start of the bidding process by going back to the selection of candidate host cities in Japan, not limited to Fukuoka, in consideration of factors such as post pandemic conditions. Then, through impartial selection criteria, site inspections and careful comparative reviews of each city, Fukuoka was finally selected as the candidate city to host the event. Careful preparations were successful, and the enthusiasm and efforts of the candidate city, Fukuoka, led to the successful bid to attract the 2026 meeting. Japan will hold the meeting for the second time in 12 years, with the first time being in Sapporo in 2014.

[Annual Meeting of Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS)] An international conference by an academic society established for the purpose of bringing together researchers in fields related to earth sciences in the Asia-Oceania region to deepen discussions and comprehensively promote earth sciences such as atmospheric science, ocean science, biological earth science, and solid earth science. Since 2015, the annual meeting has been held alternately between Singapore, where the secretariat is located, and other cities.