Zoning for the sustainable development mode of global social-ecological systems: From the supply-production-demand perspective

Telecoupling among social-ecological systems poses a significant challenge to achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the Anthropocene. This article focuses on the fact that international trade has separated the production and consumption places, the framework for assessing social-ecological system sustainability is proposed to exploring the global national-scale sustainable development mode. The results show that international trade has both synergistic and trade-off effects on sustainable development. Countries with abundant ecological resources can achieve the ecology-economic equilibrium mode by exports, and countries with scarce ecological resources and more developed can maintain the ecology-wellbeing equilibrium mode through imports. However, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the underdeveloped countries with low agricultural technology have to rely on imports, leading to an ecological over-protection mode that limits their sustainable development. More significantly, this article proposes adaptive strategies for different sustainable development modes. These strategies have important implications for achieving SDGs through developing adaptive governance measures of social-ecological systems.