Against the backdrop of growing global sustainable development challenges and China’s ongoing efforts to advance ecological civilization, education for sustainable development (ESD) has become a pivotal educational philosophy for promoting social transformation and cultivating the core competencies required of future citizens. Its systematic integration into secondary education is therefore particularly urgent. There exists a structural alignment between geography and ESD in terms of disciplinary essence, cognitive tools for geographical thinking, and inquiry-based pedagogy, as well as the transformative learning paradigm and competency goals advocated by ESD. Geography should thus serve as a principal arena for implementing ESD at the secondary level. On the basis of a systematic examination of the internal logic linking the two, and in connection with relevant teaching content in secondary geography, this paper proposes several strategies for integrating ESD into geography teaching: reshaping the classroom ecology to expand the space for geography-based sustainable development education, transforming teaching methods to promote student-centered geographical inquiry, and strengthening comprehensive preparation to build pre-service geography teachers’ capacities for ESD.