Quality education is one of the pillars in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. This overall goal can be connected to some general trends affecting education in the information age. We argue that education is key to the future quality of human life and the sustainability of the world. Generally, education is being transformed in both formal and informal learning contexts by new digital technologies. Overall, some of these major innovations and how they are changing education can be summarized into the following aspects: 1) our educational aims and objectives; 2) educational ecologies and contexts of learning; 3) the processes of learning; 4) the processes of teaching; and 5) educational governance and policy. Meanwhile, we note some of the potential risks and downsides of these technology trends. From the sustainable perspective, our review points to a great potential for educational reform, but it can only be achieved if we are willing to rethink and even abandon some of our traditional ways of doing things in education.

As the world's top two economies, the United States (U.S.) and China face a number of similar water resources problems. Yet, few studies have been done to systematically compare policies and approaches on water resources management between China and the U.S. This study compares water resources policies of China and the U.S. in the areas of national authority, water supply, water quality, and ecosystem use of the water to draw lessons learned and shed light on water resources management in China, the U.S., and the rest of the world. The lessons learned from the comparison include six aspects. 1) New paradigms of people-water harmony and a water-saving society are urgently needed to address the pressing water crisis and achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). 2) A comprehensive, consistent, forward-looking national policy is necessary to achieve sustainable use of water resources. 3) Empowerment of river basin commissions with comprehensive authority over the integrative management of air, land, water, and biological resources in the river basin could significantly enhance the benefits and effectiveness of economic development and environmental protection. 4) Expansion of water exchange through market mechanisms among water users promotes efficient and beneficial water uses. 5) Use of water for ecosystem services should be an integral part of water resources management. China has set up a national blueprint for achieving ecological civilization; maintaining appropriate amounts of flow in rivers and lakes for maintenance of wildlife and fisheries and ecosystems should be institutionalized as part of this national strategy as well. 6) By sharing their rich experiences and lessons in water resources management, economic development, and ecological protection with other countries, China and the U.S. can help the world to achieve global human-water harmony and the UN SDGs.

China and the United States are the two most significant nations in the contemporary global food and agricultural network. In addition, they are two of the most important innovators with respect to the development of new crop varieties, agro-technologies, farm products, markets and consumer issues, such as consumer resistance to genetically modified foods, among others. In the face of an ever-complex web of interactions, technologies and products among producers and consumers in both nations, there are far more structural similarities than differences in the food and agriculture sectors of these two nations. This essay, adopting some of the themes of the Sino-American Symposium on Future Issues Affecting Quality of Life, presents a limited but representative comparative assessment of three of the most important shared challenges impacting the agricultural sectors of China and the United States for the period from 2000 to the present including 1) environmental challenges related to agricultural water supply, 2) declines in farm labor and rural population, and 3) growing food-related concerns and challenges. For both nations, excessive and unsustainable groundwater consumption has lowered water tables and limited crop production. Rural populations and farm workforces in both nations are also declining, leading to labor challenges in both nations. Finally, concerns regarding food safety are also very similar with major challenges to the farm sector associated with consumer resistance to genetically modified food crops and sanitation issues linked to lengthening supply chains. All of these issues threaten the development of sustainable agricultural production systems.

This essay considers China's emerging role as a “laboratory” for innovation in achieving urban sustainability. Its purpose is to highlight, in the context of the Sino-American Symposium on Future Issues Affecting Quality of Life, aspects of Chinese urbanization which contribute to China's increasing global significance as a site for natural experiments in urban sustainability. Such experiments are relevant not only to the future quality of life in China, but also to the growing number of countries participating in development partnerships with China. The essay begins with an overview of urban sustainability and China's particular urban challenges. We then focus on three aspects of Chinese urbanization which stand out as distinct in fostering urban innovation and in serving as appropriate laboratories for the development of innovative practices in urban sustainability for the global south— the pace, scale and governance of urbanization. We use examples from the city of Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, to ground the discussion in a specific place, while acknowledging that, although Taiyuan serves well to illustrate many key points, it is only one case and cannot serve as a basis of generalization about China as a whole.

To illustrate how the universality of climate change is exhibited in radically different specifics, Kalamazoo, Michigan’s “100-year flood plain” which has been flooded three or four times in the past several years is offered as an immediate example. The county's general topography and very complex watersheds are described, noting the similarity between this microcosm and giant riparian systems. China's enormous data collection and analysis system founded on a magnificent recursive feedback loop is described. The parallel structure of human cognition as an inherited psycho-biological recursive feedback loop as the structure of all human cognition and learning is described with reference to how infants actually learn their native language. A brief summary of the critical role of China's “Three Teachings” (Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism) in fostering adaptation to nature is proposed in contrast to the Western preference for manipulating nature to fit human comfort. Practicing traditional modes of “meditation” is urged as a pathway towards a brighter future for both humanity and the nature. Coopting specialists in publicizing and advertising is required to help change the human narrative.

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) have been studied extensively over the past decade as an important policy tool for coordinating ecological protection and regional socioeconomic development. One of the greatest challenges of PES implementation is to understand where to pay, i.e., spatial targeting, which can directly impact PES effectiveness and efficiency. In this study, we conducted a systematic review of spatial targeting methods based on literature analysis using Citespace. Firstly, peer-reviewed articles related to spatial targeting of PES were selected from the Web of Science database based on keywords. Cases applying PES spatial targeting methods were then chosen and analyzed after all articles were read. In total, 70% of the chosen cases focused on improving the compensation efficiency of biodiversity or another single environmental objective, whereas the remaining cases focused on coordinating trade-offs between equity and efficiency or multiple environmental objectives. The main PES spatial targeting approaches included cost-benefit analysis, multi-objective optimization, data envelope analysis and other methods aimed at specific issues. Of these, cost-benefit analysis has been most widely applied at different scales, including county, regional and watershed scales. Significant differences among the different PES spatial targeting methods were found, including in PES spatial targeting dimensions, efficiency optimization approaches and method application conditions. The practice of PES spatial targeting requires the selection of appropriate methods based on contextual biophysical and socioeconomic conditions as well as relevant environmental issues. The combined application of PES spatial targeting methods, compensation willingness of stakeholders and dynamic implementation of PES spatial targeting should be considered in future research.

Ecosystem Services (ES) are common-pool resources that can be valued by people's willingness to pay (WTP). In contrast to place-based WTP research at the community-level, the stakeholders tend to be geographically diverse, and the benefits are not spatially apparent on the national level. Aiming to find the geographical diversity of the WTP for ES at the large scale, this study implemented an online survey of more than 25,000 samples to detect the WTP of Chinese people for water conservation, soil retention, carbon fixation, pollution decomposition, biodiversity conservation, and aesthetic existence of the Tibetan Plateau. The results showed the top limit of payments was 1,080.95 CNY/year/capita on average, and people would like to pay 172.40 CNY/year/capita for water conservation, which is the highest among the six ES. The percent of people “Aged 16-35”, “Government agency staff” and “Know WTP” influenced payments at provincial level. On an individual level, people's knowledge and attitudes directly drove the payment amounts, as well as their ecosystem management decisions. Consequently, geographical diversity of the payment for ES exists in China, and in contrast to the objective social structure and spatial accessibility of ES, people's knowledge and attitudes were the main driving forces of this geographical diversity. These findings suggest that a bottom-up adaptive governance approach is encouraged for managing common pool resources in developing countries.

The industrial spatial relationship is a cross-cutting subject of economic geography and geographical information science which has considerable significance to promote a sustainable planning and development of regional economic system. Taking Shenyang City as our study area and using the location information of manufacturing units and automobile sales outlets extracted from points of interest (POI), we investigated the spatial relationship between the two industries from integration, correlation and coordination perspective. Based on spatial statistical analyses, the equipment manufacturing industry and the automobile sales industry in Shenyang City showed a spatial complementary integration, weak spatial correlation, and coordination with scale dependence and spatial heterogeneity in 2018. This distribution characteristic is attributed to: 1) local policy factors (i.e., that industrial land should be located in the periphery of the city or outside the Second Ring Road), and 2) the economic factors (i.e., that the degree of dependence of the equipment manufacturing industry and automobile sales industry were also influenced by external factors such as costs). These results improved the current industrial spatial relationship analysis by developing a new framework based on POI big data in order to accelerate a coordinated development between manufacturing and service industries and to promote the construction of industrial ecosystem.

The COVID-19 outbreak that became a global pandemic in early 2020 is starting to affect agricultural supply chains and leading to a rapid rise in global food prices. As many grain exporting countries announced a ban on grain exports, food security issues in China have attracted a significant international attention. Based on the Suitability Distribution Model and Soybean-Cereal Constraint Model, we explored the relationship between soybean production potential and food security. We calculated that the soybean potential planting area in China is 164.3 million ha. If the outbreak prevents China from importing soybeans, soybean planting area will need to be increased by 6.9 times to satisfy the demands. In the meantime, cereal self-sufficiency rate will drop to 63.4%, which will greatly affect food security. Each additional unit of soybean production will reduce 3.9 units of cereal production, and 1% increase in the self-sufficiency rate of soybean will result in a 0.63% drop in the self-sufficiency rate of cereal. Without sacrificing the self-sufficiency rate of cereal, the self-sufficiency rate of soybean is limited to 42%. Consequently, China will still need to import more than 68% of the current import volume of soybean. Although in the short term, the outbreak will not affect food security in China, as soybean imports decrease, insufficient supply of soybeans will affect people's quality of life. To prevent the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, China should increase soybean stocks and strengthen international cooperation. In the long term, increasing the self-sufficiency rate is a fundamental solution to solving soybean import dependency. The key to increasing soybean cultivation is by making soybean cultivation profitable and by building a sustainable soybean planting chain.