Introduction China and Australia are two examples of countries that have been able to develop rather rapidly while also creating enough room for further economic expansion. Even though they are not exactly similar, numerous discussion topics could bring China and Australia down to a common denominator and enable their collaborative development. The advent of failures and benefits will be unavoidable, but the idea for the two governments should be to remain a textbook example for other countries. Their environmental practices could be developed in the most sustainable ways possible, but the key challenge, in this case, revolves around the fact that the rest of the developing world might not have enough resources to follow the Chinese and Australian agendas on international disputes (Bo et al., 2019; Thuy & Welfield, 2019). This is why the case of Chinese-Australian sustainable practices should be addressed in rich detail, providing enough room for advancements in economic performance and higher standards of living. On a long-term scale, the relationship between Australia and China can be seen as affected by industrialization and all the patterns deriving from their collaborative efforts. Despite China being a much more technology-fixated nation than Australia, the latter also attempts to spark its economic growth through the interface of available resources and energy (Itiki et al., 2020). Therefore, international disputes between these two countries could be hypothesized to remain contingent on renewable energy and reduced exploitation of natural resources. The current paper aims to review the relationship between a variety of variables affecting the Chinese-Australian dispute on the sustainable environment in an attempt to cover the possible development patterns and outline the biggest barriers. Both countries can be considered examples of global influencers in terms of attitudes toward the environment and sustainability challenges. This is why plenty of sustainable developmental patterns are yet to be discovered with the aid of international disputes and long-term collaborations. Essential Elements of the Chinese-Australian Dispute on Sustainable Environment The Context of Energy, Economy, and Environment (E3) Energy The first element to consider is the domination of non-renewable energy sources that stand behind more than half of consumption trends across China and Australia. The key difference between the countries is that Chinese coal production, for example, is much stronger than its Australian counterpart (Bekun et al., 2020). This means that China could be questioning some of the initiatives related to sustainable environmental solutions due to the improved access to conventional sources of energy. Since China’s global output grows annually, there is no doubt about the fact that the local approach to energy production and consumption could be different from other countries. While both countries possess domestic reserves of non-renewable sources, their future is going to remain clear because no specific obstacles are averting them from a hybrid energy system where conventional and renewable sources of energy are used together (He, 2018; Thuy & Welfield, 2019). With oil being a not-so-popular domestic energy source between China and Australia, its c