Assessing coupling interactions in a safe and just operating space for regional sustainability

Human activities affect the Earth System with an unprecedented magnitude, causing undesirable irreversible degradation. The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide an integrated global action plan for sustainable development. However, it remains a great challenge to develop acti...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2023-03, Vol.14 (1), p.1369-15, Article 1369
Main Authors: Han, Dongni, Yu, Deyong, Qiu, Jiangxiao
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
704/844/2739/2819
704/844/685
Climate change
Consumption
Cultural heritage
Economic development
Economic reform
Environmental economics
Environmental management
Environmental performance
Human performance
Humanities and Social Sciences
Laboratories
multidisciplinary
Regional analysis
Regional development
Regional planning
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Sustainability
Sustainability transitions
Sustainable development
Well being
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Human activities affect the Earth System with an unprecedented magnitude, causing undesirable irreversible degradation. The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide an integrated global action plan for sustainable development. However, it remains a great challenge to develop actionable strategies to achieve regional sustainability within social-environmental constraints. Here we proposed a framework, integrating safe and just operating space (SJOS) with SDGs, to assess regional sustainability and interactions between environmental performance and human well-being across scales. Despite China has not fully achieved sustainable development from 2000 to 2018, most provinces have shown significant improvements. Our analyses further delineated four development patterns (i.e., coupled and developed, coupled and underdeveloped, uncoupled and underdeveloped, and coupled and underdeveloped), and developed targeted strategies and pathways for each pattern to transition towards sustainability. Our operationalizable framework is broadly applicable to other regions or nations to actualize sustainable development. Here the authors propose an operationalizable framework, integrating safe and just operating space with Sustainable Development Goals, to assess regional sustainability and develops targeted strategies for actualizing sustainable development across scales.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-023-37073-z