The 2023 China International Fair for Trade in Services, which was held in Beijing from Sept 2 to 6, was in many ways a grand celebration of the push that investment and trade in services can provide to the pursuit of sustainable development.

Services can play a crucial role in promoting sustainable development, especially across the vast developing world, which comprises over 150 countries, according to the International Monetary Fund, and where challenges remain steep.

Realizing the United Nations' ambitious Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, which was adopted in 2015, has become imperative. But its goals are proving elusive, given their complex nature and extensive scope, as well as limited political will, financing and social awareness.

This is also the consequence of a series of converging crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the climate crisis, and the lack of an effective multilateral world order truly reflecting the rise of the South and accounting for the heavy historical responsibilities of traditional powers of the North.

As a result, around 50 percent of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals have seen weak or insufficient progress, and over 30 percent have registered a regression, especially across crucial domains such as poverty, hunger, inequality and climate action.

Service sectors have actually been the main engine of economic growth globally since the 1990s. Services matter both domestically and internationally, as they currently account for about 50 percent of global trade. Interestingly, in 2022, 54 percent of global service exports were delivered digitally — an almost 400 percent increase since the early 2000s. This provided even more export opportunities for developing countries, as digitalization removes many of the traditional physical barriers to progress.

Of the 12 broad service sectors identified by the General Agreement on Trade in Services, none is perhaps more important to inclusive growth, well-being and social mobility than health and education, the so-called great equalizers.

Sustainable tourism is one of the service sectors that has proved to be particularly dynamic and effective at delivering sustainable development across the developing world. It is a sector that is constantly expanding, and is one that can maximize benefits to ecosystems, peoples, cultures and economies, and therefore advance multiple Sustainable Development Goals at once. After all, tourism is one of the few domains in which remote locations and pristine landscapes, combined with distinctive cultural heritage, can represent significant competitive advantages. Emerging sustainable tourism destinations are increasingly small island developing states and even least-developed countries.

An important contribution can also come from more complex, innovation-based sectors such as financial, information and communication services. These, too, can be highly conducive to overcoming traditional development hurdles such as size or being landlocked or isolated, provided that they are inspired by visions of positive socioeconomic and environmental impact.

In this regard, and particularly prominent at the China International Fair for Trade in Services and its International Climate Conference of People Forum on Sept 3, was the showcasing of China's pledge to usher in a new eco-civilization at home and abroad, and the highlighting of environmental services as core drivers of green, inclusive growth.

This is a clear reflection of Beijing's active pursuit of its dual decarbonization goals — peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060 — combined with the aim of doubling China's GDP per capita by 2035.

These bold undertakings denote firm confidence in the country's ability to keep deploying a wide range of conducive policy measures, as well as necessary financial and technological resources.

We can therefore expect a further strengthening of China's legislative support for the low-carbon transition of sectors such as manufacturing, transportation and construction; increased afforestation; and, crucially, a reduction in the use of energy from fossil fuels, to roughly 25 percent, via greater harnessing of the already world-leading installed capacity of all forms of renewable energy.

Just like the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda as a whole, the dual decarbonization goals represent a huge challenge, but also an immense opportunity to bring about environmentally sound, quality progress for economies and societies alike.

In this context, especially across the developing Global South, service sectors should certainly continue to aim at boosting trade volumes and economic growth. At the same time, they should concern themselves with addressing fundamental needs and generating positive impacts on both people and nature.

To properly evaluate the impacts, assets (including environmental capital and ecosystem services) and progress in general, it's obvious that new, more qualitative, holistic metrics must be employed. Narrow notions of development based exclusively on GDP maximization are not only outdated, but also inherently flawed and partial.

China, with its relentless commitment to mobilizing cooperation for inclusive development, promoting an ecological civilization and eradicating the indignities of poverty, continues to represent a source of concrete inspiration in the very practice, and service, of sustainability.

The author is an international development and sustainability expert based in Zhuhai, Guangdong province.