Towards sustainability balance in water-food-land nexus global development

The significant differences between quality of life and resource use characterise a sustainability imbalance in current global development. Evidence shows that infrastructure development, environmental capacity, and resource dependence are three driving factors. These three factors should be investigated to reduce the imbalance in future development, so that people in all countries can live a better life supported by adequate resources, without causing significant environmental degradation over the globe. This study conceptualises and quantifies the three driving factors in the water-food-land nexus based on the global social-environmental datasets. The three factors are aggregated into a sustainability imbalance index as a national-scale indicator. Then we investigate statistical correlations among the factors to uncover their interdependencies as driving mechanisms. Results indicate that achieving a sustainability balance at a global scale needs to significantly narrow the infrastructure development gap, with countries’ resource dependence informed by their environmental capacity. We propose ‘responsible’, ‘moderate’, ‘ambitious’, and ‘flexible’ development pathways towards the sustainability balance and discuss their practical implementation constraints. Our results highlight the importance of coordinating the key development drivers, which should be supported by systems-level information. Implementing the pathways needs more enhanced global collaborations towards a brighter future for people and our precious planet.