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The sustainability of land conversion to urban use is an important factor that promotes sustainable urbanization. However, China's local governments have relied too much on the land finance model for urbanization, which has led to disordered growth of urban land, ultimately posing a threat to ecosystem security and socioeconomic development. Effectively evaluating the factors that influence the growth of urban land is critical to improving the sustainability of urban land use. In this study, we explored the factors that affect the growth in the area of urban land using spatial analysis models based on panel data for Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2007 to 2019. We found that fiscal decentralization, infrastructure, industrialization, and industrial upgrading were the main factors responsible for the growth of urban land, but that their degrees of influence differed between regions. Our findings identify the necessity for local governments to design urban land-use policies and perform strategic planning for urban land use to improve sustainability based on the main factors that influenced the growth of urban land in each region., (© 2022. The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.)

Urbanization is a dominant component of social and economic development around the world, but this process creates tremendous pressure on the ecological environment. How to achieve coordination between urbanization and conservation of this environment has become a key issue, especially in developing countries. It is necessary to identify the driving factors that affect this coordination. To identify these factors, we chose 290 Chinese prefecture-level cities to analyze the driving factors behind urbanization using spatial regression analysis, and explored the spatial differences among regions in these factors. Our results show that industrial upgrading and technological progress were the main factors that promoted coordinated development, with industrialization having positive effects under government management, but with differences among regions in how the driving forces affected coordinated development. Using technological progress to promote industrial upgrading, creating new employment to absorb surplus rural labor, and providing workers with skills training so they can take advantage of new jobs can promote win-win solutions that coordinate urbanization with conservation of the ecological environment.

Ecological restoration and conservation are primary components of sustainable development around the world, particularly during the contemporary era of climate change. However, restoration and conservation are not free; they consume huge amounts of resources that would otherwise support social and economic development. Therefore, excessive conservation creates a risk of creating rather than eliminating poverty. Unfortunately, scientists have largely ignored the balance between these contrasting goals. Here, we discuss the concept of finding the threshold that represents a suitable balance between ecological conservation and economic development, thereby maximizing the benefits for both humans and the environment and promoting sustainable development. To demonstrate the concept, we examined China's ecological restoration achievements and discussed some of the unforeseen negative consequences that accompanied these achievements to discuss how future policies could better balance ecological and socioeconomic goals.

China has among the highest biodiversities in the world, but faces extreme biodiversity losses due to the country's huge population and its recent explosive socioeconomic development. Despite huge efforts and investments by the government and Chinese society to conserve biodiversity, especially in recent decades, biodiversity losses may not have been reversed, and may even have been exacerbated by unintended consequences resulting from these projects. China's centralized approach to biodiversity conservation, with limited local participation, creates an inflexible and inefficient approach because of conflicts between local communities and national administrators over the benefits. Although community-based conservation may be an imperfect approach, it is an essential component of a successful future national conservation plan. Biodiversity conservation should be considered from the perspective of systems engineering and a governance structure that combines centralization with community-level conservation. In this paper, we describe China's complex challenge: how to manage interactions between humans and nature to find win-win solutions that can ensure long-term biodiversity conservation without sacrificing human concerns.

Many societies face an income gap between rich regions with access to advanced technology and regions that are rich in natural resources but poorer in technology. This "resource curse" can lead to a Kuznets trap, in which economic inequalities between the rich and the poor increase during the process of socioeconomic development. This can also lead to depletion of natural resources, environmental degradation, social instability, and declining socioeconomic development. These problems will jeopardize China's achievements if the current path continues to be pursued without intervention by the government to solve the problems. To mitigate the socioeconomic development gap between western and eastern China, the government implemented its Western Development Program in 2000. However, recent data suggest that this program has instead worsened the resource curse. Because each region has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, China must escape the resource curse by accounting for this difference; in western China, this can be done by improving education, promoting high-tech industry, adjusting its economic strategy to balance regional development, and seeking more sustainable approaches to socioeconomic development.

China leads the world in afforestation, and is one of the few countries whose forested area is increasing. However, this massive "greening" effort has been less effective than expected; afforestation has sometimes produced unintended environmental, ecological, and socioeconomic consequences, and has failed to achieve the desired ecological benefits. Where afforestation has succeeded, the approach was tailored to local environmental conditions. Using the right plant species or species composition for the site and considering alternatives such as grassland restoration have been important success factors. To expand this success, government policy should shift from a forest-based approach to a results-based approach. In addition, long-term monitoring must be implemented to provide the data needed to develop a cost-effective, scientifically informed restoration policy.

The life of impoverished people can be damaged by adverse environmental conditions, but these people can also be harmed by environmental conservation programs, particularly when the guiding policy ignores their needs. To improve the social and economic effectiveness of environmental protection, governments must understand that the ultimate goal of environmental protection is to improve human livelihoods, not just restore vegetation. The elimination of poverty by the development of sustainable, long-term enterprises is a precondition for successful ecological restoration.

Traditional approaches to ecosystem restoration have considered afforestation to be an important tool. To alleviate land degradation in China, the Chinese government has therefore invested huge amounts of money in planting trees. However, the results of more than half a century of large-scale afforestation in arid and semi-arid China have shown that when the trees are not adapted to the local environment, the policy does not improve the environment, and may instead increase environmental degradation. When precipitation is lower than potential evaporation, surface soil moisture typically cannot sustain forest vegetation, and shrubs or steppe species replace the forest to form a sustainable natural ecosystem that exists in a stable equilibrium with the available water supply. The climate of much of northwestern China appears to be unsuitable for afforestation owing to the extremely low rainfall. Although some small-scale or short-term afforestation efforts have succeeded in this region, many of the resulting forests have died or degraded over longer periods, so policymakers must understand that these small-scale or short-term results do not support an inflexible policy of large-scale afforestation throughout arid and semi-arid northwestern China. Rather than focusing solely on afforestation, it would be more effective to attempt to recreate natural ecosystems that are better adapted to local environments and that thus provide a better chance of sustainable, long-term rehabilitation.