How to promote Geography for Sustainability

Human interactions with Earth systems have accelerated dramatically in recent decades. Human activities are altering the Earth system and exerting significant impacts on the environment, and undermining improvements in human wellbeing and poverty alleviation. In order to secure global prosperity and transform to global sustainability, United Nations launched the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015. The goals include efforts to eradicate extreme poverty and to consolidate efforts to slow climate change and preserve our world environment. The process of implementing the SDGs has created new challenges for policy makers and for the scientific community. Half of the Sustainable Development Goals are related to environment and natural resources. Geographical Science is one of the most important KEY for sustainable development. Geographers have been conducting various experiments and modelling at multi-scales, and tried to identify the relationships between human activities and various earth surface processes, dwell on ecosystem processes and ecosystem services trade off at multi-scale, model the effects of human activity and earth systems, and try to figure out the possible sustainable solutions for regional, national and global developments. It’s time to launch a new journal focus on Geography and Sustainability for the world. That’s why, Faculty of Geographical Science (Beijing Normal University) start to publish the new journal: Geography and Sustainability. The new journal focus on: Geographical processes, Human-Environmental Systems, Ecosystem services and human being, Sustainable development, Geo-data and model for Sustainability. The new journal is also the office journal for IGU Commission on Geography for Future Earth: Coupled Human-Earth Systems for Sustainability.