Achieving sustainable development in an increasingly interconnected globalized world requires cross-system thinking and more integrated regional policy. First, it requires disciplines devoted to sustainable development research to improve their insights into trans-regional resource and environmental issues. Accordingly, it is necessary to promote the adaptive innovation and transformation of the traditional research framework of geography. Telecoupling, as a theoretical framework focusing on socioeconomic and environmental interactions among coupled human and natural systems over distances, has great potential and advantages to facilitate the process of theoretical innovation. In order to narrow the gap between Chinese and international research in the field of telecoupling, we introduce the telecoupling framework and its application progress from theoretical construction, empirical evidence, key research areas, and research methods based on literature review, document analysis, and our own understanding of telecoupling, and further give some suggests. The review shows that there is a large amount of empirical evidence of telecoupling in the dimensions of teleconnection, globalization, and urbanization due to the continuous growth of long-distance human activities and their interaction with large-scale natural processes. Currently, the application of the telecoupling framework in academia mainly focuses on three aspects: ecosystem services, the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of telecoupling, and land change science. Due to the progress in operationalizing the theories, current telecoupling research has been well supported methodologically. We further argue that geographical research based on the telecoupling framework should make breakthroughs in the theoretical innovation of Human-Earth relationship network system, telecoupling mechanism, and telecoupling regulatory tool sets, so that scientific research can keep up with the latest trends and solve the emerging real world problems.