The world is changing at an accelerating pace due to increased human exploitation of the earth's resources and the consequent climate change and biodiversity loss crises. As a transdisciplinary discipline studying the coupled human and nature systems and their interactions, Geography has natural advantages to promote sustainable development. With the aim of stimulating sustainable development in the Anthropocene, the International Geography and Sustainability Workshop 2021 was held virtually during 23-24 November 2021. This editorial briefly reviews the development history of Geography, summarizes the presentations of keynote speakers, outlines the overall research framework, and discusses the future directions by which the discipline of Geography can be harnessed to advance sustainable development. The key outcomes are as follows: (1) The research paradigms of Geography are shifting from basic knowledge acquisition to understanding of coupling patterns and processes, and to the simulation and prediction of complex human-earth systems; (2) Landscape sustainability science and the metacoupling concept are emerging as new comprehensive research perspectives, and the framework of “Pattern—Process—Service—Sustainability” can be used as a basis to underpin Geography's role in sustainability; (3) Geography can support sustainable development in many ways, such as in agricultural development, disaster and risk monitoring and early warning, global climate change mitigation, and in helping to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Future research directions include: integrated geographical research on climate change and sustainable resource utilization; integrated geographical research on social and economic sustainable development; sustainable cascades of ecosystem structure, functions, services, and human well-being; metacoupling for sustainability; safe and justice space boundaries; the classification-coordination-collaboration approach; and geographical education for sustainable development.

Eradicating extreme poverty is one of the UN's primary sustainable development goals (SDG). Arable land is related to eradicating poverty (SDG1) and hunger (SDG2). However, the linkage between arable land use and poverty reduction is ambiguous and has seldom been investigated globally. Six indicators of agricultural inputs, crop intensification and extensification were used to explore the relationship between arable land use and poverty. Non-parametric machine learning methods were used to analyze the linkage between agriculture and poverty at the global scale, including the classification and regression tree (CART) and random forest models. We found that the yield gap, fertilizer consumption and potential cropland ratio in protected areas correlated with poverty. Developing countries usually had a ratio of actual to potential yield less than 0.33 and fertilizer consumption less than 7.31 kg/ha. Overall, crop extensification, intensification and agricultural inputs were related to poverty at the global level.

Due to rapid urbanization and industrialization, the gap between urban and rural development has gradually increased. Rural development problems have been a significant topic of discussion, and are related to people's livelihoods. This article built a point-axis-region location driving system to analyze the spatial location differentiation of characteristic villages and towns (CVTS) using the kernel density model, and explored the mechanism of location driving factors with a geographical detector model. The results show that vegetables and fruits are the main types of products in CVTS. They account for 27.60% and 34.68% of all types of products, and occur mainly in the east and central regions of China. Moreover, all point-axis-region driving factors have a significant influence on grain crops. The mean values of driving forces of vegetables and fruits are larger than other types of CVTS, and their values are 0.12 and 0.11. The average driving forces on all CVTS in the northeast are higher than those in other regions, especially the driving forces of vegetables and medicinal crops (0.24 and 0.18, respectively). Finally, we proposed that the Chinese government should employ engineering technology, invest on road networks, e-commerce and blockchain technology to optimize the point-axis-region location advantages, to promote the sustainable development of CVTS. The detection of driving mechanisms on spatial location differentiation of CVTS has important research value for location theory and rural region systems research.

China is the world's largest consumer of pork and grains. However, African swine fever (ASF) and the COVID-19 outbreak have greatly impacted the pork supply and food security in China. How can food security and the pork supply be ensured under the dual impacts of COVID-19 and ASF? This is a major problem to be urgently solved by the Chinese government. This study indicated that the main pork production and sales areas in China were separated, which reflected the spatial imbalance between the supply and demand. The total area of suitable selected sites for pig farms in China is 21.5 million ha. If only the areas with levels of high and moderate suitability are considered as potential sites for pig farms, the potential pork production can reach 56.1 million tons in China, which is slightly lower than demand. Due to the impact of the ASF epidemic, the food consumed by pigs has been reduced by 34.7 million tons. However, with increasing pork productivity in the future, the self-sufficiency rate of grains may further decline. On the premise that the quality of people's life is not affected, the diversification of meat supply channels should be realized in an orderly and sustainable way, which might alleviate the pressure on food supply. This study provides a theoretical reference for the spatiotemporal layout of the swine industry and addresses the issue of food security in China under the influence of ASF and the COVID-19 outbreak.

The urban resilience concept was introduced in 2016 as a key concept in the Habitat III New Urban Agenda for the next 20 years. We wonder how this urban resilience concept was elaborated and who influenced it the most? The preparatory events structured several stakeholders’ networks. The relations between stakeholders allowed the flow of ideas in the consultation and production process. Some influential stakeholders strongly oriented definition of urban resilience concepts by taking power in the networking process of the consecutive meetings. The paper analyzes the network of stakeholders/concepts, during the building process between 2012 and 2016 (5,539 discourses from 290 stakeholders, in 357 events). The application of textual mining and machine learning topic modelling algorithm exposed the structure of the principal topics for building the concept of urban resilience, and presented how relations of main stakeholders with Funders was crucial for the investment in policy interventions. Therefore, we underlined for the first time in an empirical way, different kinds of actors’ power in the construction process that supported the Habitat III resilience concept. We demonstrated how far some official stakeholders, but also external and private ones, oriented the construction of ideologies to validate the knowledge that supported the related actions in laboratory cities.

Livelihood assets are a matter of high concern for secured survival. Drought-prone Gamo lowland households have differential access to livelihood resources which indicates the varying capacity of resisting to shocks. The main objective of this study is to explore the impacts of livelihood assets on livelihood security in the drought-prone Gamo lowlands. Multistage sampling procedures were employed to select the study sites and sample respondents. Primary data of households’ capital assets and livelihood security status were produced from 285 survey households, agricultural experts, key informants, focus group discussants, and field observation through transect walks. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze quantitative data, whereas discussions and annotations were employed for analyzing qualitative data. The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework is used with modifications to schematize the study conceptually. The findings indicated that the study households possessed combinations of livelihood resources differentially. Financial and natural capitals were found to be the most deficient and better-accessed capitals, respectively. The study also showed that lowland residents’ access to assets has significant indications of livelihood security. Households’ poor access to assets such as financial, information, and social capital demands raised attention of the concerned stakeholders and policy debates in the drought-prone rural setup. Hence, it has been concluded that the more assets are accessed, the stronger the capacity of the households to resist shocks, and better the livelihood security. Accordingly, enhancing people’s access to multiple livelihood assets is suggested to sustainably secure livelihoods.

Advances in scholarly research are routinely associated with specific fields and traditional disciplines. New fields such as sustainability, climate change, gender studies and “green knowledge” emerge with inter- and cross-disciplinary subject matter, methods and techniques. Sustainability has emerged as an integrative research field on a global scale not only with contributions from the social and natural sciences in the past two decades but with contributions from the humanities and sciences. These breakthroughs present challenges to traditional fields and opportunities for better understanding of processes and impacts. The challenges facing geography include working with both visible and invisible worlds, going beyond “comfort zone” research boundaries, recognizing the importance of maps and mapping, and integrating politics in sustainability worlds at local, regional and global scales.

Urban green spaces (UGS) are essential for human well-being, contributing towards quality of life and promoting social interactions and inclusion. Accessibility to recreational UGS is key to human well-being in urban areas. However, there is a lack of works focused on recreational UGS accessibility in cities from different countries, using different types of transport. In this work, we studied the accessibility to recreational UGS in Vilnius (Lithuania) and Coimbra (Portugal) through four transport modes (foot, bike, bus and car) within 5- and 10-minute distance. The results showed important differences between cities. Vilnius had higher accessibility to recreational UGS than Coimbra in all transport modes. In both cities, the accessibility was highest by car and lowest by bus. Also, the percentage of population covered by 5- and 10-minute distance UGS accessibility in Vilnius is higher than in Coimbra, despite the lower population density in Vilnius. A large number of recreational UGS, their geographic distribution, the dispersed population pattern, and the location of several urbanizations near recreational UGS increased the inhabitant’s accessibility to recreational UGS in Vilnius. The differences in accessibility between cities were mainly attributed to the large number of recreational UGS and higher road network density, cycleways and footways density, and bus lines in Vilnius, compared to Coimbra. This work identified the areas where recreational UGS accessibility is difficult in using different transport modes and need to be improved in study areas. This is essential to support urban planners and increase cities’ well-being. The findings of this work will be important for the management of the studied urban areas.

Freshwater plays a vital role in global sustainability by improving human lives and protecting nature. In the Lancang-Mekong River Basin (LMRB), sustainable development is principally dependent upon precipitation that predominantly controls freshwater resources availability required for both life and livelihood of ∼70 million people. Hence, this study comprehensively analyzed long-term historical precipitation patterns (in terms of trends, variability, and links to climate teleconnections) throughout the LMRB as well as its upper (Lancang River Basin, LRB) and lower (Mekong River Basin, MRB) parts employing six gauge-based gridded climate products: Asian Precipitation Highly-Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE), Climate Prediction Center (CPC), Climate Research Unit (CRU), Global Precipitation Climatology Center (GPCC), Precipitation Reconstruction over Land (PRECL), and University of Delaware (UDEL). Accordingly, annual and seasonal (dry and wet) precipitation time series were calculated for three study periods: century-long outlook (1901-2010), mid-past (1951-2010), and recent decades (1981-2010). However, the role of climate teleconnections in precipitation variability over the LMRB was only identified during their available temporal coverages: mid-past and recent decades. The results generally showed that: (i) both annual and seasonal precipitation increased across all three basins in 1981-2010; (ii) wet and dry seasons got drier and wetter, respectively, in all basins in 1951-2010; (iii) all such changes were Fundamentally attributed to increases in precipitation variability on both annual and seasonal scales over time; (iv) these variations were most strongly associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) and East Pacific/North Pacific (EP/NP) pattern in the LMRB and the MRB during 1951-2010, but with the North Sea-Caspian Pattern (NCP) and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) in the LRB; (v) such relationships got stronger in 1981-2010, while the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) became the most influential teleconnection for dry season precipitation variability across all basins; and (vi) GPCC (APHRODITE) provided the most reliable gauge-based gridded precipitation time series over the LMRB for the years before (after) 1951. These findings lay a Foundation for further studies focusing on water resources and sustainable development in the LMRB.