United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Land-Use Systems from Resource-Nexus Perspectives

In recent decades, the demand for natural resources has been rapidly growing, causing serious impacts, risks, and threats to humans on different scales. Therefore, it is necessary to manage natural resources in a more sustainable manner, considering an integrated approach to the interdependencies of resource use in order to achieve the SDGs. In future, scientific concerns should include the interrelationships between resources, their synergistic trade-off mechanisms with the Sustainable Development Goals, and modeling approaches to the SDGs from a policy perspective. This Special Issue (SI) focuses on discussing how to address the issue of land-resource misallocation hindering regional sustainable development from a resource-nexus perspective. We will discuss the ability of a nexus approach to assess critical interlinkages across natural resources (water, energy, food, materials, and land) along their relative value chains and its ability to enable sustainable resource-use pathways, particularly with respect to the SDGs concerning food (SDG 2), water (SDG 6), energy (SDG 7), cities (SDG 11), and production and consumption (SDG 12). This provides an opportunity for scholars around the world, including environmental scientists, geographers, ecologists, and natural-resource scientists, to share their multidisciplinary knowledge. This not only helps to further improve theoretical land-use transformation systems, but also provides a new research perspective for land-system optimization and regional sustainable development.