Agriculture provides humanity with the most basic products to sustain life and raw materials for production, closely linking human society and nature together. The sustainable development of agriculture, an inevitable choice to maintain long-term social stability, steady economic growth, and ecological security, is the key to the coordinated development of the economy, society, and environment in developing Central Asia economies. We attempted to evaluate the trend of agricultural sustainability in Central Asia between 2002 and 2017 by adopting analytic hierarchy process and entropy weight method in this study. It was found that the overall sustainability level of regional agriculture is rising, which is mainly driven by economic progress, with social and ecological dimensions contributing much less. Accordingly, we advanced four suggestions: enhancing water productivity, optimizing planting techniques, improving agricultural cooperatives, and promoting digital land management to boost the agricultural sustainability of the region.

The “Belt and Road” Initiative (BRI), i.e., the official Chinese term for the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, was proposed to share China’s development opportunities with BRI-related countries and achieve common prosperity. Though the BRI itself conveys rich social and economic connotations, ecosystem health and the environmental problems in the Belt and Road regions are scientific issues. In this study, papers relating to the ecological issues of the BRI between January 2013 and December 2021 were collected and analyzed via CiteSpace. We found that some ecological issues were involved with the environmental challenges posed by the BRI, whereas others were, to a certain extent, subjective assumptions. Accordingly, we identified and classified the limitations and constraints of those environmental views about the BRI. By emphasizing that scientific data is key to explaining the ecological problems, we advanced four prospects for ecosystem health and environmental geography studies in the Belt and Road regions: (1) Spatial analysis and monitoring technology for the environment; (2) Clarification of the characteristics and mechanisms of the ecosystem and environments; (3) A focus on the interaction between the economy and the environment; (4) Specific and targeted strategies and solutions to different environmental problems.

With the widespread recognition and in-depth implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), especially in the context of global climate change, the ecological environment of Belt and Road Initiative regions might be confronted with pressures and challenges with rapid socioeconomic development. In response to those potential environmental challenges, China has put forward Green BRI and enriched the new Silk Road with more environmental connotations, aiming to reduce the conflict between economic development and eco-environmental protection. Currently, there is a lack of systematic and holistic research on eco-environmental issues in BRI regions. In addition, feasible solutions to enhance BRI’s contribution to the eco-environment remain insufficient. Having systematically reviewed the relevant literature on the eco-environment in BRI regions, we found that most regions along the BRI routes are in sensitive zones of climate and geological change, with fragile eco-environments and strong vulnerability to climate change, natural disasters and human activities. The main eco-environment status of the BRI regions is as follows: (1) The total water resources in BRI regions account for only 36% of the global total, with uneven distribution and complex spatial precipitation, posing higher pressure on water security. (2) Vegetation varies significantly from region to region. The vegetation in South Asia is the richest, with its mean annual NDVI exceeding 0.7. The NDVI in East Europe, Russia and South China are between 0.4 and 0.7, and that in Central Asia and West Asia are below 0.2. (3) The BRI regions are abundantly blessed with natural resources, with the total recoverable oil reserves, natural gas reserves and the total mining area reaching 66%, 65.5% and 42.31% of the world’s total, respectively, but severe overexploitation and overconsumption of those resources degrade their eco-environment. Accordingly, future research directions, such as target on integrated, interdisciplinary and coordinated studies on eco-environmental issues in BRI regions, are proposed in this paper to achieve optimization of BRI’s contribution to eco-environment protection in BRI regions.