Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action

Bing Xue,Mario Tobias

doi:10.3390/su7043714

Abstract

As the biggest emerging and developing country, and the second largest economy on the planet, China’s road to sustainability has attracted global attention; therefore, we need to have a deeper understanding to address this issue at very different levels. This editorial mainly reviews the contributions of the published papers in the Special Issue of “Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action”, the main findings in this special edition suggest that the concept of sustainability is more comprehensive and complex, and the transformation process from scientific knowledge to local action still has a long way to go, not only in China, but also in many developing countries. More research on the fundamental and innovative processes of sustainable transformations should be conducted. China needs to make more efforts to strengthen its road to sustainability, by merging all relevant types of knowledge, both within and outside science, as well as locally and globally.As the biggest emerging and developing country, and the second largest economy on the planet, China's road to sustainability has attracted global attention; therefore, we need to have a deeper understanding to address this issue at very different levels. This editorial mainly reviews the contributions of the published papers in the Special Issue of "Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action", the main findings in this special edition suggest that the concept of sustainability is more comprehensive and complex, and the transformation process from scientific knowledge to local action still has a long way to go, not only in China, but also in many developing countries. More research on the fundamental and innovative processes of sustainable transformations should be conducted. China needs to make more efforts to strengthen its road to sustainability, by merging all relevant types of knowledge, both within and outside science, as well as locally and globally.

Highlights

As the biggest emerging and developing country on the planet, China’s rapid pace of both urbanization and industrialization over the past few decades has attracted global attention, while a heavy environmental price has been paid for being the world’s second-largest economy [1]
Concerns range from generating sustainable household livelihoods to global climate change, to developing technological applications to generate institutional changes
As a major force behind anthropogenic carbon emissions, China accounted for 29% of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2012 and 80% of the world’s increase in CO2 emissions since 2008 [5], and carbon emission has been one of the biggest challenges on China’s road to long-term sustainability [6], the uncertainty of China’s CO2 emission are always being discussed [7], more efforts should be made in uncovering China’s carbon emission in various sectors

Summary

Introduction

As the biggest emerging and developing country on the planet, China’s rapid pace of both urbanization and industrialization over the past few decades has attracted global attention, while a heavy environmental price has been paid for being the world’s second-largest economy [1]. Just as Liu concluded that “any individual force can cause positive and negative impacts on sustainability directly or in-directly” [3], we need to have a deeper understanding into China’s sustainability at very different levels. Both spatially and structurally, concerns range from generating sustainable household livelihoods to global climate change, to developing technological applications to generate institutional changes. China needs both local, case-based empirical studies, as well as global, experience-based learning to inform itself of the best route towards sustainability

Contributions

Outlook

Findings

29. United