The changes in land cover patterns in the Mongolian Plateau can reveal the regional status of sustainable development. Based on land cover data from 1990–2020, the study reveals the process of land cover change on the Mongolian plateau and integrates those changes with UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to further evaluate regional sustainable development status. Result revealed there is a stable rate of land cover change (0.16%) for the Mongolian Plateau, but with diverse shifting trends for various land cover types and SDGs indicators in past 30 years. Croplands (SDG2) showed a growth trend in the last five years, which was different from its initial obviously decreasing trend. The status of water (SDG6) showed a clear decreasing trend, which presents a major threat to this arid-to-semi-arid region. The built area (SDG11) increased continuously, but the long upward trend has slowed in recent years. The forest area (SDG15) declined, but it has recently recovered. Grasslands showed diverse changes in various steppe types (including real, meadow, and desert steppe types) while still experiencing land degradation. The expansion of sand areas presents a hidden risk of increasing sandstorms. Comparative analysis revealed that there have clear differences between Mongolia and Inner Mongolia due to the various government policies. In general, the land use degree in Mongolian Plateau increased annually. This indicated that the climate change and human activities have more and more influences, and it is still facing severe challenges for specific SDGs indicators in the region.

The Mongolian Plateau is one of the cradles of sandstorms in Asia, among which the Gobi region of Mongolia and the desert region of western Inner Mongolia are to blame for the frequent sandstorms in China and Mongolia in recent years. First, based on meteorological observation data about sandstorms and text data of news events, we collected 76 sandstorm events on the Mongolian Plateau from 2000 to 2021 in the study. Second, we downloaded MODIS data of corresponding spatiotemporal regions, which were screened and processed in combination with the cloud size. And we preprocessed the MODIS data for geometric correction with MRTK plugin in the ENVI software. Then, we constructed the DSDI of dust index and extracted the spatial distribution information of dust to obtain the of spring sandstorm distribution of Mongolian Plateau. With the ArcGIS software for random selection of verification points, we used the station record, text data, image enhancement, visual interpretation to complete the accuracy evaluation. The overall classification accuracy reaches 85.24% with a Kappa coefficient of 0.7636. This dataset can directly reflect the spatial distribution of sandstorms on the Mongolian Plateau, which can provide detailed and reliable data support for the control of sandstorm disasters. At the same time, it can also back up decision-making process of controlling the risk of sandstorm disasters on the Mongolian Plateau.