Environmental Systems Engineering and Circular Economy for Sustainable Transition

Climate change poses interconnected challenges across water, energy, land, and ecosystem services, demanding integrated approaches that link greenhouse gas mitigation with sustainable resource management. Environmental systems engineering offers a framework for analyzing these interactions, yet a persistent gap remains between advances in systems modeling and their translation into actionable circular economy and resource recovery strategies. While individual tools, including computable general equilibrium models, life cycle assessment, hydrological simulations, optimization algorithms, have matured considerably, few studies integrate them across disciplinary boundaries to evaluate trade-offs between climate mitigation, material circularity, renewable energy integration, and ecosystem integrity at system scale.This Research Topic brings together theoretical developments, methodological innovations, and applied case studies that advance environmental systems engineering for climate change mitigation and resource sustainability. It welcomes contributions from experimental and field research, systems modeling and simulation, optimization and decision-support frameworks, and policy analysis, particularly work that quantifies environmental outcomes and demonstrates cross-scale or cross-sector integration.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• Experimental and field studies validating environmental system interventions or resource recovery approaches, with quantified environmental performance indicators• Modeling and simulation of coupled environmental-ecological-socioeconomic systems under climate change scenarios• Optimization and decision-support frameworks for water, energy, and material resource management under uncertainty• Renewable energy integration and energy-transition pathways assessed through environmental systems analysis, including trade-offs between decarbonization, resource use, and ecosystem impacts• Circular economy applications: material flow analysis, industrial symbiosis, waste valorization, linked to measurable environmental outcomes (e.g., emission reductions, resource savings)• Climate change impact assessment and mitigation strategy evaluation using systems-level analytical tools (e.g., IOA, CGE, LCA, integrated assessment models)Submissions should center on environmental systems analysis and demonstrate a clear link between the methods employed and quantified environmental or resource management outcomes. Studies focused primarily on corporate strategy, supply chain management, or digital economy topics without a core environmental systems dimension are outside the scope of this Research Topic. Topic editors: Mengyu Zhai, Yurui Fan, Feng Wang Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80375/environmental-systems-engineering-and-circular-economy-for-sustainable-transition