Managing the food‒energy‒water nexus towards promoting holistic progress of the Sustainable Development Goals in China

• A nexus framework mitigates SDG trade-offs and enhances synergies. • FEW nexus impacted SDGs via resource flows and economic-environmental efficiency. • Core FEW network regions gained SDG benefits; peripheries faced efficiency losses. • Optimizing nexus effects of energy-water flows can serve as SDG leverage points. • Nexus-based governance enables coordinated regional policies for SDG progress. Food, energy, and water (FEW), as essential resources for societal well-being, constitute a critical intervention domain for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through interregional resource flows and associated nexus effects, the FEW nexus redistributes economic benefits and environmental pressures across regions while interacting with broader development domains. However, how these processes influence trade-offs and synergies among SDGs across regions, and how coordinated FEW nexus management can be leveraged to promote holistic SDG progress, remain insufficiently understood. Focusing on China, this study revealed the spatial pattern shaped by FEW flows and the associated economic benefits and environmental efficiencies, quantified the significant but heterogeneous progress towards the SDGs, and systematically identified the impact of the FEW nexus on SDG progress. The results showed that food and energy flows generally enhanced SDG synergies both locally and through spillover effects, whereas current water flow patterns exhibited more significant negative impacts on multiple SDGs. Cross-regional synergies, efficiency inequalities and environmental pressure transfers, and multi-resource nexus effects collectively constituted the core mechanisms through which the FEW nexus affected SDG progress. The nexus effects of energy and water flows could serve as leverage points for mitigating temporal and spatial trade-offs among the SDGs. Finally, an integrative framework was proposed to systematically identify synergies and trade-offs across goals, regions, and scales, thereby supporting cross-sectoral and cross-regional coordinated governance strategies that avoid siloed optimization and accelerate holistic progress towards the SDGs.