Causal Linkages Between Forestation, Health Issues, and Sustainability Dimensions in the United States and China: A Climate Resilience Perspective

ABSTRACT

Growing environmental pressures and climate‐related risks have intensified concerns regarding population health and sustainability. This study explores how the predictive relationship between public health and key sustainability indicators, such as agricultural emissions, forests, governance, digitalization, green energy, and climate outcomes, varies over time across the United States and China. For this, the study applied the Bootstrap rolling window Granger causality framework to identify whether health sustainability relationships remain stable or vary over time. The study uses the annual data from 1996 to 2023. The findings revealed different structural patterns. For instance, in the United States, causal flows from sustainability factors to health with episodic positive effects from forest, green energy, and climate outcomes, while digitalization exhibited weak health reinforcement. In contrast, for China, health exhibits stronger predictive effects on agricultural emissions, renewable energy transitions, and governance indicators. The results indicate distinct sustainability health pathways, with environmental conditions playing a more prominent role in health dynamics in the United States, while improvements in health are more closely associated with sustainability transition in China, which can be used to inform resilience‐oriented policy development.