With industrialization and human development over the past centuries, one of the primary challenges to humans is the global biodiversity loss at a massively accelerated rate. The United Nations (UN) has adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), aiming to provide human welfare and conserve the planet, now and into the future. Two of the SDGs directly address biodiversity conservation and sustainable development – SDG 14 (life below water) and SDG 15 (life on land). Although the UN has issued annual reports on SDGs, the reports do not consistently reveal the progress over time, because of inconsistent methods such as estimation based on different indicators across years. Besides the lack of a consistent assessment of integrated efforts (e.g., SDGs 14 and 15) in biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, the other challenge for conservation science is to identify key drivers for the socioecological changes and achieve environmental and socioeconomic sustainability within and across boundaries. The main objective of this dissertation is to fill the knowledge gaps by providing a consistent assessment of SDGs 14 and 15 over time (Chapter 2), exploring the key drivers for socioecological changes (Chapter 3), and conducting scenario analysis through the metacoupling framework and modeling approaches (Chapter 4). This dissertation would better inform countries to review their sustainable development progress associated with Life below Water and Life on Land and empower decision-makers with support for future conservation planning and sustainable development. The open-source database would contribute to future research in biodiversity conservation, sustainability science, and other disciplines. The methodology used in this study can also be generalized and contribute to the broader scientific community and beyond.
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