CO-to-H₂ conversion factor (α_CO) as a function of the CO luminosity for the 19 dust clouds (green dots) from Takekoshi et al. (2017) within our observed regions at 12 pc resolution. To calculate the CO luminosity, we use the measured CO intensity used in Eq. (15) and the dust cloud size (R) given by Takekoshi et al. (2017). The dot-dashed line indicates the median dust-based (K kms⁻¹ pc²)⁻¹ for the SMC dust clouds. The conversion factor obtained for each of the 124 SMC CO clouds assuming gravitational virial condition are shown as red dots (see Fig. 6d), with a median value of (K kms⁻¹ pc²)⁻¹ (dashed line). The dotted line corresponds to the canonical Milky Way (MW) conversion factor.