Landscape sustainability science and the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

Achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires place-based solutions that reconcile global aspirations with local realities. Landscapes and regions represent a pivotal scale domain—large enough to capture cross-boundary ecological and socioeconomic processes, yet sufficiently grounded to enable context-sensitive understanding and governance. Landscape sustainability science offers a robust framework for bridging the global-local divide in SDG implementation. Rooted in the long-standing convergence between ecology and geography—tracing back to Humboldt’s unity of nature—landscape sustainability science advances a spatially explicit, systems-oriented approach guided by the principles of strong sustainability. Here we present the landscape sustainability science framework, structured around the core triad of landscape pattern, ecosystem services, and human wellbeing, and operationalized through dual feedback loops and the analysis–adaptation–assessment cycle. Our assessment shows that landscape sustainability science contributes directly to eight SDGs and indirectly to six others, offering actionable strategies for climate resilience, sustainable land management, and inclusive landscape governance. By helping to spatialize, localize, and operationalize global sustainability targets, landscape sustainability science provides a pragmatic pathway to advance the SDGs in diverse socioecological contexts. If global sustainability is to be achieved, we must think and act like a landscape.

Keywords

Landscape sustainability science / Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) / Integration between ecology and geography / Coupled human–environment systems / Ecosystem services and human wellbeing

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jianguo (Jingle) Wu: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Julius Addai: Investigation, Writing – review & editing. Macharia Consolata: Investigation, Writing – review & editing. Zening Gao: Investigation, Writing – review & editing. Erica Martin: Investigation, Writing – review & editing. Emily Sezate Yasutake: Investigation, Writing – review & editing. Yucang Wang: Investigation, Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have influenced the work reported in this article.

Acknowledgements

JW thanks the journal’s editorial team for the invitation to contribute this editorial. Portions of this article benefited from discussions in the course Landscape Sustainability: Principles and Methods, taught by JW at Arizona State University in Fall 2024.

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