As a global financial center and one of the world’s first-tier cities, Hong Kong is committed to sustainable development and it expects to become the most sustainable city in Asia. With this in mind, this paper evaluates the level of sustainable development in Hong Kong considering the factors of ecological footprint, biocapacity, and the human development index (HDI) from 1995 to 2016, in order to make policy recommendations for transforming Hong Kong into a more sustainable city. Between 1995 and 2016, a period during which the HDI rose, the per capita ecological footprint of Hong Kong increased from 4.842 gha to 6.223 gha. Moreover, fossil energy consumption had a crucial impact on the city’s ecological footprint, whereas the biocapacity of Hong Kong declined gradually. By contrast, Singapore, a city-state with an area similar to Hong Kong’s, presented the opposite situation—the HDI increased while the ecological footprint decreased. We performed a further comparative analysis and a SWOT analysis of Singapore and Hong Kong to elaborate on how to decouple the large ecological footprint from human society development. Concluding that the focus must be on energy consumption, reduction of the human activities’ negative impacts on marine environment, citizens and government, we provide policy suggestions for transforming toward a “high HDI and low footprint” sustainable development society in Hong Kong.

Rapid urbanization has been associated with substantial structural adjustments and ecological risks in peri-urban agroforestry landscapes. Taking Pidu District, Chengdu, China, as a representative peri-urban region, this study investigated the spatiotemporal evolution of agroforestry landscapes and their ecological risks from 2000 to 2020. Utilizing multi-period land-use data, we integrated landscape pattern indices, an ecological risk assessment model, etc. The results showed that the agroforestry landscape area decreased by 24.53%, from 275.39 km² to 207.83 km², a decline primarily tied to the expansion of construction land. Ecological risk increased continuously over the study period, with high-risk areas concentrated in the rapidly urbanizing southern region and low-risk areas mainly distributed in the northern agricultural zone. Meanwhile, landscape fragmentation intensified, as reflected by increasing patch subdivision and declining landscape integrity. Bivariate spatial autocorrelation analysis revealed a positive spatial association between fragmentation and ecological risk, indicating that structural degradation of agroforestry landscapes is an important factor of ecological risk escalation. Overall, rapid urbanization in Pidu District was accompanied by the coupled processes of agroforestry landscape shrinkage, fragmentation, and ecological risk growth. These findings provide scientific support for ecological risk zoning management and agroforestry landscape conservation in similar rapidly urbanizing regions.