Spatiotemporal heterogeneity management: Optimizing the critical role of ecosystem services in achieving Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

Ecosystems play a pivotal role in advancing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by providing indispensable and resilient ecosystem services (ESs). However, the limited analysis of spatiotemporal heterogeneity often restricts the recognition of ESs’ roles in attaining SDGs and landscape planning. We selected 183 counties in the Sichuan Province as the study area and mapped 10 SDGs and 7 ESs from 2000 to 2020. We used correlation analysis, principal component analysis, Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression model, and self-organizing maps to reveal the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the impacts of the bundle of ESs on the SDGs and to develop spatial planning and management strategies. The results showed that (1) SDGs were improved in all counties, with SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) exhibiting poor performance. Western Sichuan demonstrated stronger performance in environment-related SDGs in the Sichuan Province, while the Sichuan Basin showed better progress in socio-economic-related SDGs; (2) habitat quality, carbon sequestration, air pollution removal, and soil retention significantly influenced the development of 9 SDGs; (3) supporting, regulating, and provisioning service bundles have persistent and stable spatiotemporal heterogeneity effects on SDG1, SDG8, SDG11, SDG13, and SDG15. These findings substantiate the need for integrated management of multiple ESs and facilitate the regional achievement of SDGs in geographically intricate areas.

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) / Ecosystem service (ES) / Impact bundle / Spatial planning / Sichuan Province

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Lingli Zuo: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Validation, Software, Resources, Investigation, Data curation, Conceptualization. Guohua Liu: Visualization, Supervision, Resources, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Junyan Zhao: Data curation. Jiajia Li: Data curation. Shuyuan Zheng: Data curation. Xukun Su: Visualization, Supervision, Resources, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP) of China (Grant No. 2019QZKK0402).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.06.008.

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