The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outlines objectives for the future of human society. Achieving these goals requires global monitoring and modelling of the Earth system, involving physical and socio-economic factors. The CAS and HKU teams are conducting research on advancing both observational and analytical technologies to enable monitoring of essential metrics related to 6 of the 17 SDGs, including SDG2 (food), SDG6 (water), SDG11 (cities), SDG13 (climate change), SD14 (ocean), and SDG14 (terrestrial ecosystem). Mechanistic modelling will then be used to connect these essential metrics to SDGs. The project has four key research foci: 1) Earth observations; 2) iEarth technology; 3) Modelling capacity; 4) SDGs pathways. The management of a State Key Laboratory and several national programmes over the past 25 years supports the joint lab for sustainable development research.