At the annual conference of the Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations held in New York from 10th to 28th May, 2004, it was decided that CAST be granted the consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of United Nations (ECOSOC) and that the decision would go into effect in July, 2004.

Since then, CAST has actively played the consultative functions. According to the program of UN Millennium Development Goals, CAST carried out the consultative activities mainly in three key areas, including ICT, environment as well as life science and human health, and established three committees accordingly as follows: the CAST consultative committee for UN information and communication technology (CCIT), the CAST working group for UN energy consultation (WGUNEC) and CAST consultative committee for UN life science and human health (CCLH).

These committees focus on the UN key areas and already organized the experts to carry out the soft researches to form the national report; organized the experts to attend a series of UN meetings, including the Tunis Phase of World Summit on Information Society (Tunis, 2005), UN high level session on AIDS (Geneva, 2005), the 11th conference of the parties of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (11th COP of UNFCCC, Canada, 2005), the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and  Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BWC, Geneva, 2005), the simulation conference of the 58th annual meeting of UN DPI/NGO (Beijing, 2006), the 12th COP of UNFCCC ( Nairobi, 2006), the first Forum on Internet Governance (IGF, Athens, 2006), the General Assembly of WHO ( Geneva, 2007), UN AIDS Conference in Asia and Pacific regions (Sri lanka, 2007), the First Forum of UN Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN GAID, Brazil, 2007). And especially in year 2006, we successfully applied to hold the Chinese side event both in 12th COP of UNFCCC and in the first IGF, which has fully played the core function of CAST consultative status.

And the consultative project led by CAST and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, titled Global Alliance for Enhancing Access to & Application of Scientific Data in Developing Countries of UN GAID (e-SDDC), has been approved by UN GAID in 2006, which is the only one project approved in Asia; Besides, we took all of our efforts to successfully apply a Chinese workshop in the 60th annual conference of UN DPI/NGO in 2007 on the topic of climate change, which is very significant for us because there are hundreds of proposals for 30 slots, and our proposal is only one approved from Asia.