How Landscape Patterns and Ecosystem Services Shape Basin-Scale Progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals

Understanding how ecological structure and ecosystem functions shape progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is essential for improving sustainability governance in large river basins. This study integrated landscape patterns (LPs) and ecosystem services (ESs) into an SDG assessment framework to examine sustainability trajectories and ecological drivers across 69 prefecture-level cities in the Yellow River Basin from 2000 to 2022. Results indicate that the basin-wide SDG composite score increased substantially by 47.7% from 2000 to 2022, but persistent disparities remained between the more developed middle and lower reaches and the western plateau and arid regions. Improvements were broadest in indicators related to welfare, equity, resource-use efficiency, environmental infrastructure, and urban environmental quality, and the interactions among these indicators were dominated by synergistic relationships. However, economic growth dynamics (SDG 8.1.1) and carbon-emission performance (SDG 13.2.1) remained major constraints on coordinated sustainability progress, as both showed declining trends and were negatively correlated with multiple SDG indicators. The panel-data models further showed that 93.8% of the SDG indicators were significantly associated with at least one LP or ES variable. Among these ecological drivers, food production showed significant positive effects on 31.3% of the indicators, followed by carbon sequestration, with significant positive effects on 25.0%, whereas patch density exerted significant negative effects on 18.8% of the indicators. These findings underscore the close interdependencies among landscape configuration, ES provision, and SDG outcomes, highlighting the potential of landscape planning and ES optimization to promote coordinated economic, social, and environmental development in the Yellow River Basin.