Since the earth entered into a new era of the Anthropocene Era,the humanenvironment relationship has become extremely complicated. As the important driving factor of the human-environment relationship,livelihoods provides the new perspective and the new tool for understanding the human-environment relationship. For now,geography has become one of the most active discipline researching sustainable livelihoods. Based on the overviewing the origin and framework of sustainable livelihoods research,we tease out the research status of the major topics in geography,which include the spatial heterogeneity of livelihoods,the relationship between livelihoods and eco-environment,the impact of vulnerability context/ consequence and process transformation (such as climate change,land use / cover change,payment for ecological service and rural tourism) on the farmers' livelihoods,and livelihoods vulnerability assessment. Then,we point out that the relevant research in geography has paid less attention to the dynamics of livelihoods,the impact of globalization on livelihoods and the impact of multi-stressor on livelihoods,and in the meantime,short of comprehensive integration of the new techniques and methods. Finally,we present the prospects of future studies for sustainable livelihoods in geography which include the livelihoods' patterns-processes-mechanism,the trans-scale question of livelihoods,the ecological-economic-social effect of livelihoods transformation,the formation and regulation of livelihoods vulnerability and livelihoods sustainability. These prospects and reviews would help to offer revelation and reference for domestic relevant researches.