Decoupling environmental impact from economic growth to achieve Sustainable Development Goals in China.

Developing countries, such as China, have achieved unprecedented success in a single Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), which usually leads to trade-offs between the three pillars of sustainability, and even destroys sustainability. Quantifying the degrees of coupling among the pillars is essential to support policymakers' systematic actions to minimize trade-offs and maximize co-benefits between the pillars, and simultaneously achieve all SDGs. However, assessing the degrees of coupling among the pillars for the full SDGs is lacking. Here, we evaluate the progress of the pillars towards the SDGs and quantify the degrees of coupling among them at both national and sub-national levels in China from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the degrees of coupling among the pillars were almost constant while the degrees of coupling between the pillars and economic growth declined over time. The degrees of coupling between environmental impact and economic growth accounted for 52%-83% of the SDGs' progress. Reducing the degrees of coupling helps achieve simultaneously economic growth and environmental protection. The higher the degrees of coupling, the lower progress. This trend was universal among all provinces (sub-national level) regardless of their development levels. Our study highlights not only the necessity to track the degrees of coupling among the pillars, but also decoupling environmental impact from economic growth to achieve the SDGs.