New research shows that the level of sustainable development in China

Chinese and foreign scholars published a report in nature on January 1, saying that they used new methods to assess China's achievement of 17 UN sustainable development goals, and the results showed that China's level of sustainable development has significantly improved at the national and provincial levels. In September 2015, the United Nations adopted the 2030 sustainable development agenda with 17 sustainable development goals as the core, aiming at eradicating poverty, eradicating hunger, promoting gender equality, coping with climate change and strengthening the global partnership for sustainable development. Based on the documents and reports issued by the United Nations, researchers from Agricultural University of China and Michigan State University in the United States have constructed a new evaluation system to measure the overall and individual goals of China's sustainable development.

The assessment report shows that from 2000 to 2015, China has made remarkable achievements in implementing sustainable development from the national level to the provincial level. Among them, the national sustainable development index increased from 45.5 to 55.4, up nearly 22%; the provincial sustainable development index increased from 42.2 to 54.9, up 30%. Li Yunkai, a professor at China Agricultural University and one of the report's correspondents, said in an interview: "from the results of the assessment, China attaches great importance to the implementation of the sustainable development agenda and organically integrates the implementation with the country's medium - and long-term development strategy, which has achieved results at present." In terms of specific individual goals, the assessment results show that China has achieved "significant improvement" in 13 of these 17 goals, especially in the five aspects of poverty eradication, health and well-being improvement, industrial innovation and infrastructure construction, inequality reduction and strengthening the global partnership for sustainable development.