The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change call for deep transformations in every country that will require complementary actions by governments, civil society, science and business. Yet stakeholders lack a shared understanding of how the 17 SDGs can be operationalized. Drawing on earlier work by The World in 2050 initiative, we introduce six SDG Transformations as modular building-blocks of SDG achievement: (1) education, gender and inequality; (2) health, well-being and demography; (3) energy decarbonization and sustainable industry; (4) sustainable food, land, water and oceans; (5) sustainable cities and communities; and (6) digital revolution for sustainable development. Each Transformation identifies priority investments and regulatory challenges, calling for actions by well-defined parts of government working with business and civil society. Transformations may therefore be operationalized within the structures of government while respecting the strong interdependencies across the 17 SDGs. We also outline an action agenda for science to provide the knowledge required for designing, implementing and monitoring the SDG Transformations. The Sustainable Development Goals require profound national and societal changes. This Perspective introduces six Transformations as building blocks for achieving the SDGs and an agenda for science to provide the requisite knowledge.

Six transformations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

To address global challenges1-4, 193 countries have committed to the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)5. Quantifying progress towards achieving the SDGs is essential to track global efforts towards sustainable development and guide policy development and implementation. However, systematic methods for assessing spatio-temporal progress towards achieving the SDGs are lacking. Here we develop and test systematic methods to quantify progress towards the 17 SDGs at national and subnational levels in China. Our analyses indicate that China's SDG Index score (an aggregate score representing the overall performance towards achieving all 17 SDGs) increased at the national level from 2000 to 2015. Every province also increased its SDG Index score over this period. There were large spatio-temporal variations across regions. For example, eastern China had a higher SDG Index score than western China in the 2000s, and southern China had a higher SDG Index score than northern China in 2015. At the national level, the scores of 13 of the 17 SDGs improved over time, but the scores of four SDGs declined. This study suggests the need to track the spatio-temporal dynamics of progress towards SDGs at the global level and in other nations.

Assessing progress towards sustainable development over space and time

Quantifying the dynamics of land use change is critical in tackling global societal challenges such as food security, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Here we analyse the dynamics of global land use change at an unprecedented spatial resolution by combining multiple open data streams (remote sensing, reconstructions and statistics) to create the HIstoric Land Dynamics Assessment + (HILDA +). We estimate that land use change has affected almost a third (32%) of the global land area in just six decades (1960-2019) and, thus, is around four times greater in extent than previously estimated from long-term land change assessments. We also identify geographically diverging land use change processes, with afforestation and cropland abandonment in the Global North and deforestation and agricultural expansion in the South. Here, we show that observed phases of accelerating (~1960–2005) and decelerating (2006–2019) land use change can be explained by the effects of global trade on agricultural production. Quantifying land use change is critical in tackling global challenges related to food, climate and biodiversity. Here the authors show that land use change has affected 32 % of the global land area in six decades (1960- 2019) by combining multiple open datasets to create the HIstoric Land Dynamics Assessment +.

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Global land use changes are four times greater than previously estimated

Rural land system reforms in China: History, issues, measures and prospects

Land-use change is fragmenting natural ecosystems, with major consequences for biodiversity. This paper reviews fragmentation trends - historical and current - in China, the fourth largest country on Earth, and explores its consequences. Remote sensing makes it possible to track land-use change at a global scale and monitor fragmentation of dwindling natural landscapes. Yet few studies have linked fragmentation mapped remotely with impacts on biodiversity within human-modified landscapes. Recent reforestation programs have caused substantial increases in forest cover but have not stopped fragmentation, because the new forests are mostly monocultures that further fragment China's remnant old-growth lowland forests that harbour the highest levels of biodiversity. Fragmentation - and associated biodiversity declines - is unevenly distributed in China's forests, being most problematic where agricultural expansion is occurring in the southwest and northeast, serious in the densely populated eastern regions where urbanisation and transport infrastructure are modifying landscapes, but less of a problem in other regions. Analyses of temporal trends show that the drivers of forest fragmentation are shifting from mainly agricultural expansion to urbanisation and infrastructure development. Most of China's old-growth forests persist in small, isolated fragments from which many native species have disappeared, on land unsuitable for human utilisation. Fragmentation throughout China is likely to have major consequences on biodiversity conservation, but few studies have considered these large-scale processes at the national level. Our review fills this research gap and puts forward a systematic perspective relevant to China and beyond.

Forest fragmentation in China and its effect on biodiversity.

China has responded to a national land-system sustainability emergency via an integrated portfolio of large-scale programmes. Here we review 16 sustainability programmes, which invested US$378.5 billion (in 2015 US$), covered 623.9 million hectares of land and involved over 500 million people, mostly since 1998. We find overwhelmingly that the interventions improved the sustainability of China’s rural land systems, but the impacts are nuanced and adverse outcomes have occurred. We identify some key characteristics of programme success, potential risks to their durability, and future research needs. We suggest directions for China and other nations as they progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations’ Agenda 2030.

Yangqiong Ye

Papers

China’s response to a national land-system sustainability emergency