The Year was promoted politically at UNESCO and at the United Nations in New York by the People’s Republic of Tanzania.
It would also designate the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to organize activities to be undertaken during the Year, in collaboration with UNEP and other relevant United Nations bodies, the International Union of Geological Sciences and other Earth sciences societies and groups throughout the world.
Also by that draft, the Assembly would encourage Member States, the United Nations system and other actors to use the Year to increase awareness of the importance of Earth sciences in achieving sustainable development and promoting local, national, regional and international action.The project was backed by the following founding partners: The Year was also supported by 23 Associate Partners, including all major international geoscientific and other relevant organisations: The Year's stated objective was to: Reduce risks for society caused by natural and human-induced hazards, reduce health problems by improving understanding of the medical aspects of Earth science, discover new natural resources and make them available in a sustainable manner, build safer structures and expand urban areas, utilizing natural subsurface conditions, determine the non-human factor in climatic change, enhance understanding of the occurrence of natural resources so as to contribute to efforts to reduce political tension, detect deep and poorly accessible groundwater resources, improve understanding of the evolution of life, increase interest in the Earth sciences in society at large, encourage more young people to study Earth science in university.Research themes for the Year included: As part of the IYPE legacy, 80 National and Regional IYPE Committees were set up to bring together key figures from various organisations into a single campaign dedicated to raising awareness of the Earth sciences among decision makers and the public.
From there, the YES Initiative expanded, eventually adopting a formal structure, a network of supporting organisations (including IYPE) and an invitation by the Chinese government to host the first International YES Conference in October 2009 in Beijing.
An international collaborative project known as OneGeology was launched, aiming to bring together geological data from all nations into a digital database and thus transform them into a single computer language, providing free access to the online digital geological world map in the scale of 1:1 million.