Enhancing the spatio-temporal dynamic monitoring of the construction land of emerging major cities provides the basis for understanding the effects of human activities on the earth’s ecological environment changes, which is regarded as an important way to improve human wellbeing and to achieve the UN SDGs. This paper, which uses Nanning as an example, adopts 30 m annual remote sensing land cover datasets from 1990–2021 to elaborately analyze the temporal evolution and spatial expansion of construction land and to evaluate the sustainable development level based on SDG 11.3.1.

Is digitalization conducive to promoting carbon reduction in cultivated land use while empowering high-quality socio-economic development and intelligent territorial spatial planning? Derived from China’s provincial panel data from the period 2011 to 2019, in this paper, we employ a fixed-effect model to study the impact of the digital economy on carbon emissions from cultivated land use and apply an intermediary-effect model to estimate the impact that the structure of the digital economy has on carbon emissions from cultivated land use.

Land is the key asset in the agricultural sector and hence land policy is one of the key elements that determine whether SDGs are achieved in developing counties or not. In developing countries, land titling programs have been seen as a strategy for addressing SDGs. Even though the government of Ethiopia launched the rural land registration and certification program (LRCP) to secure the land rights of rural households in 1998, currently, there are limited empirical studies to examine the contribution of LRCP in addressing sustainable development goals (SDGs).