Abstract:  Promoting sustainable economic and social development is a key concept in advocating the Chinese path to modernization, realizing the harmonious coexistence between human and nature, and implementing a new development concept. This paper constructed a sustainable development capacity evaluation index system consisting of 5 primary indicators of innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing, 17 secondary indicators of SDGs such as poverty eradication, hunger eradication, and 63 tertiary indicators. A projection tracing model based on the Sparrow algorithm and a fuzzy logic model were established to evaluate the dimensional development level and the comprehensive development level of the Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2015 to 2020 in order to explore its spatial correlation characteristics of sustainable development. The study showed that: (1) From the dimensional evaluation results, sustainable development in the Yangtze River Economic Zone was not equivalent. The level of innovation, green, sharing, coordination and open development increased by 26.51%, 30.37%, 18.6%, 17.86% and 3.00%, respectively. (2) From the comprehensive evaluation results, different provinces and cities could be divided into three echelons according to the average level of sustainable development capacity of the Yangtze River Economic Belt: 60-80 were in the first tier, including Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang; 40-60 were as the second, including Anhui, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Chongqing and Sichuan; 20-40 were the third, including Yunnan and Guizhou provinces. (3) In terms of the evolution of the spatial correlation characteristics, the sustainable development capability had spatial dependencies and linkages, but the spatial correlations were unstable with a large fluctuation. Specifically, the number of high-high agglomerations decreased, which were concentrated in the downstream region of Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang. The number of low-high agglomerations were in a dynamic change, which were distributed in the midstream region of Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi etc. The number of low-low agglomerations remained relatively stable, which were distributed in the upstream region of Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan etc.