Achieving sustainability is the key to a better future, which requires an accurate assessment of current and historic levels of sustainability at scales that can help targeted interventions. Yet, current assessments of sus-tainability are mostly focused at national and subnational levels that often fail to capture local and regional variations, especially in regions where management interventions are most needed. A grid-cell level analysis that can yield high-resolution maps of sustainability indices could address this challenge. This study aims to present the first high-resolution map of China's sustainability which integrates the social, economic, and environmental dimensions . The grid level sustainability maps reveal over 1.23 billion Chinese have been free from low sus-tainability area. There are large variations in sustainability across China with only 2.3% of the country in high sustainability zone and over 140 million, mostly in the northern and northeastern regions, inhabiting under low sustainability conditions. A lower sustainability index within each province is usually accompanied by higher variations of the index suggesting a lack of coordination and greater inequality between and within provinces. Our high-resolution maps of China's sustainability index provide valuable insights into the spatial distribution of sustainability in the country and could help policymakers identify regions to implement targeted interventions.
NSTL
Elsevier
