Socio-ecological Sustainability and Resilience in Rural and Urban-rural Frontier Areas

Socio-ecological systems are complex, adaptive assemblages of environmental, social, economic, cultural, and political processes whose interactions generate emergent dynamics across scales. Within transformative sustainability science, sustaining these systems requires moving beyond static conservation approaches toward resilience-based strategies that enable adaptation, learning, and transformation under global change. Rural areas can function as socio-ecological landscapes that, in theory, can easily maintain the interrelationship between social and ecological subsystems. However, the current and ubiquitous problems of rural aging and depopulation, especially in European rural landscapes, are causing a decline in the resilience of these landscapes, and this loss affects their sustainability.Urban expansion has spread into rural areas in different regions of the world, remarkably in countries in the Global South. In many cases, this expansion is creating frontier zones between urban and rural areas where there is a complex exchange of ecosystem services. These zones have been conceived, from an agricultural perspective, as productive spaces and from an urban planning perspective, as land reserves for future urban uses. These tensions highlight the challenges associated with socio-ecological sustainability and resilience in rural and urban-rural frontier areas.This Research Topic seeks contributions that advance integrative, transdisciplinary perspectives on the sustainability–resilience nexus, with particular attention to governance, equity, and transformative pathways toward socially just and ecologically viable futures.Specifically, this Research Topic seeks contributions that critically analyse the interactions between sustainability and resilience in rural and urban-rural border areas, based on multiscale approaches and case studies that offer theoretical and methodological contributions. Guiding questions on the scope of the Research Topic: • How are sustainability and resilience manifested and articulated in the socio-ecological systems of rural and urban-rural border areas?• What tensions, synergies and conflicts arise between urban and rural dynamics in contexts of rapid territorial transformation? How do these affect the socio-ecological sustainability and resilience of the "new and old" actors facing this transformation?• What local, institutional or community strategies contribute to strengthening resilience without compromising the long-term sustainability of these systems?• How do regulatory frameworks, public policies and territorial planning instruments influence the formation (or deterioration) of socio-ecological resilience?• How can local knowledge and historical practices in the territory be integrated into sustainable and resilient management strategies?• What theoretical and methodological contributions allow us to overcome dichotomous views between urban and rural, social and ecological, or productive and conservationist?• What scales of analysis are most appropriate for understanding the interactions between sustainability and resilience in urban-rural border territories?• What lessons can be learned from case studies in Latin America, Africa, and other contexts in the Global South to rethink sustainability and resilience in rural territories undergoing urban expansion?• What kind of measures should be taken to improve resilience and consolidate the sustainability of European rural landscapes?Priority will be given to works that transcend dichotomous views that separate the ecological from the social, the urban from the agrarian, or the physical-biological as mere support for urban dynamics, promoting comprehensive approaches to socio-ecological systems in contexts of territorial transformation. Topic editors: Alejandro Rescia Perazzo, Romina Giselle Sales, Marta Ortega Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/77370/socio-ecological-sustainability-and-resilience-in-rural-and-urban-rural-frontier-areas