Assessing Sustainability in Diversified Rural Food Systems: Indicators, Circular Economy Approaches, and Policy Evaluation

World Rural Development Day highlights the indispensable role of rural communities in tackling poverty, food insecurity, social exclusion, and environmental degradation. Across rural regions worldwide, agricultural households face overlapping pressures — climate variability, land-use change, resource depletion, and fragmented policy support — that threaten the long-term sustainability of food production, rural livelihoods, and land stewardship.Responding to these challenges requires both new strategies at farm and household level, and robust analytical tools to assess, monitor, and evaluate their sustainability outcomes. Agricultural diversification — spanning crops, livestock, mixed farming, agroecological practices, and off-farm activities — is widely recognised as a key pathway toward more resilient rural food systems. Yet the sustainability implications of diversification strategies remain difficult to measure and compare across contexts, particularly when economic, social, environmental, and resource-efficiency dimensions must be assessed simultaneously.This Research Topic sits at the intersection of three complementary pillars: sustainability assessment and indicator development, circular economy and resource efficiency frameworks, and policy and governance evaluation — applied to diversified rural food systems with land use, livelihoods, and food security as core outcome dimensions.Despite a growing body of literature on agricultural diversification and rural sustainability, significant gaps remain. Existing studies tend to focus on single dimensions — productivity, income, or environmental impact — rather than assessing trade-offs and synergies across these dimensions simultaneously. Integrative frameworks that capture agri-environmental performance, resource efficiency, livelihood stability, and food security within a single analytical approach are still underdeveloped.Circular economy principles offer considerable potential for rural food systems — closing nutrient loops, reducing waste, and improving resource productivity — but their application to smallholder and diversified farming contexts, and their links to livelihood and food security outcomes, remain limited. Similarly, digital tools and data-driven monitoring systems are increasingly available but are rarely designed with rural food system complexity in mind.There is also limited comparative evidence on which policy instruments and institutional arrangements most effectively support sustainable diversification, and how their outcomes can be systematically evaluated across regions and governance contexts.This collection brings together methodologically rigorous and policy-relevant contributions that advance the assessment, measurement, and governance of sustainability in diversified rural food systems. It seeks to generate evidence on which indicators, circular economy frameworks, assessment tools, and policy instruments can most effectively capture and support sustainable outcomes across land use, livelihoods, and food security — with direct relevance to SDGs 1, 2, 8, 13, and 15.The collection invites articles on, but not limited to, the following topics:Sustainability assessment and indicators• Agri-environmental indicators for diversified farming systems• Multi-criteria assessment of sustainability trade-offs across economic, social, and ecological dimensions• Integrated frameworks bridging household, territorial, and food system scalesCircular economy and resource efficiency• Circular economy approaches in smallholder and diversified farming systems• Nutrient cycling, waste reduction, and biomass flows in rural food production• Links between circularity, land productivity, and livelihood outcomesEnergy, environment, and low-carbon transitions• Renewable energy integration in rural agricultural systems• Low-carbon and energy-efficient farming practices• Ecosystem service assessment in diversified agricultural landscapesLand use, food security, and livelihoods• Food security and diet quality as sustainability outcomes• Land-use change in smallholder and mixed farming contexts• Livelihood resilience, off-farm income, and social inclusionPolicy evaluation and governance• Evaluation of agri-environmental and rural development policies• Comparative policy analysis across regions and governance contexts• Institutional arrangements and local governance for sustainable diversificationMethods, digital tools, and data systems• Digital tools, remote sensing, and data systems for rural monitoring• Participatory and mixed-methods sustainability evaluation• Multi-criteria decision-making and scenario modelling Topic editors: Justas Streimikis, Grigorios L. Kyriakopoulos Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80998/assessing-sustainability-in-diversified-rural-food-systems-indicators-circular-economy-approaches-and-policy-evaluation