Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability

Sustainable development focuses on linking economic development with environmental protection and social development to ensure future prosperity for people and the planet. To tackle global challenges of development and environment, the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. SDGs emphasize that environmental sustainability should be strongly linked to socio-economic development, which should be decoupled from escalating resource use and environmental degradation for the purpose of reducing environmental stress, enhancing human welfare, and improving regional equity. Moreover, sustainable development seeks a balance between human development and decrease in ecological/environmental marginal benefits. Under the increasing stress of climate change, many environmental problems have emerged causing severe impacts at both global and local scales, driving ecosystem service reduction and biodiversity loss. Humanity’s relationship with resource exploitation and environment protection is a major global concern, as new threats to human and environmental security emerge in the Anthropocene. Currently, the world is facing significant challenges in environmental sustainability to protect global environments and to restore degraded ecosystems, while maintaining human development with regional equality. Thus, environmental sustainability with healthy natural ecosystems is critical to maintaining human prosperity in our warming planet.