Enhancing agricultural sustainability through integrated water management: A telecoupled water-land-food-carbon assessment for China

Sustainable agriculture is increasingly constrained by water scarcity, which acts as a fundamental limiting factor shaping the interactions among land use, food production, and carbon emissions under climate change. However, existing research neglect long-distance interactions and cross scale feedbacks mechanisms among water-land-food-carbon (WLFC) nexus, limiting the understanding of agricultural water management in an interconnected system. Thus, this study developed an integrated framework to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics, trade-offs and synergies, interregional network structure, and driving mechanisms of agricultural sustainability under WLFC constraints in China from 2000 to 2023. By combining social network analysis and XGBoost-SHAP model, this research revealed the multi-scale dynamics of agricultural water system transitions. The results indicated the national agricultural sustainability increased steadily at an average annual growth rate of 2.77%. However, spatial performance exhibited pronounced east-west gradient. The system remained in a barely coordinated state with an average value of 0.57, indicating persistent trade-offs between food production, water use efficiency, carbon mitigation, and land sustainability. The spatial interaction network exhibited a multi-core, core-periphery structure with increasing telecoupling intensity but relatively low connectivity. Beijing, Jiangsu, and Shanghai acted as key hubs facilitating cross-regional resource flows, characterized by high weighted centrality (32−35) and betweenness centrality (109−136), highlighting the uneven distribution of water-related linkages. Labor, transportation accessibility and the urban-rural income gap contributed 52.26%, 19.43% and 4.13%, respectively, to sustainable transition with strong nonlinear threshold effects. These findings demonstrated agricultural water sustainable transitions were governed by spatial inequality, network structure, and nonlinear socio-economic thresholds. Improving sustainable agriculture requires strengthening interregional water connectivity, optimizing virtual water allocation, reducing spatial disparities in water use, and adopting differentiated water governance strategies tailored to regional resource conditions.