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The United Nations adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to address societal, economic and environmental sustainability issues. The efficiency of SDGs monitoring could be improved by essential variables (EVs), which can help to better deal with massive data, interdisciplinary knowledge and workloads. However, in practice, effectively combining EVs with SDGs monitoring remains challenging. In this paper, we proposed a refining method of essential SDGs variables (ESDGVs) to land degradation. Firstly, we selected northwest China as our experimental region and extracted a group of variables related to land degradation from SDG indicators based on the DPSIR framework. Next, we identify the essential ones using a combined qualitative and quantitative methods with the criteria of feasibility, spatialization, and relevance which considered the issues of data acquisition, monitoring scale, and closeness to the land degradation. Finally, we analysed the monitoring role of ESDGVs. Results show that, compared to conventional observations, ESDGVs facilitate the monitoring and evaluation of regional SDGs with reduced efforts. And both climate and human activities have a facilitating or inhibiting effect on land degradation processes. In the future, we hope to have more mature data sets and consider adding more SDG indicators for ESDGVs' refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, sustainability practices have become a global requirement to attain the high-performance goals of the organizations and capture the focus of regulators and recent researchers. Therefore, the present article aim is to investigate the board diversity (percentage of women directors, percentage of non-executive directors and board member nationality) and firm size (logarithm of total assets) on the sustainability practices (expenditures on environmental sustainability) of the top ten registered firms in China. The researchers have adopted the secondary source of data collection and extracted the data from the financial statements of the adopted firms from 2005 to 2019. Additionally, the researchers used a fixed-effect model (FEM) and a robust standard error model to investigate the relationship between the two concepts. There were positive correlations between firm size (logarithmic total assets) and board diversity (percentage of women directors, percentage of non-executive directors, and board member nationality) and China's top ten registered firms' sustainability practises (expenditures on environmental sustainability). This research provides help to the policymakers while formulating strategies and policies related to the adoption of sustainability practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]