Rethinking Rural: Data-Driven Approaches for Sustainable Development offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of sustainable rural development through a quantitative lens. Drawing on official statistics, spatial analysis, and refined indicators, this edited volume brings together leading scholars from ecology, economics, and planning to rethink the environmental-economic nexus shaping rural territories. With a focus on Europe and the Mediterranean but applicable globally, the book emphasizes continuous, spatially explicit monitoring of socio-ecological and socio-economic complexities to inform effective, place-specific policies that enhance sustainability and resilience.

Structured in three parts, the book first presents integrated perspectives on rural system evolution, including climate change impacts, land use, and socio-economic drivers across diverse contexts such as Mediterranean landscapes and Colombia’s deforestation. The second part details traditional and advanced tools for monitoring rural environments, from territorial indicators to wildfire and habitat assessment. The final section addresses planning and policy challenges, evaluating natural disaster management, resilience strategies, environmental degradation costs, and socio-demographic influences on tourism insurance.

Ideal for academics, researchers, and students in spatial planning, applied economics, environmental science, GIS, ecology, agronomy, demography, rural sociology, and geography, this volume equips readers with innovative methodologies and case studies to understand and shape sustainable rural futures.

• Assesses complex, multidisciplinary issues, with case studies spanning from agronomy to demography, from ecology to economics, all connected under a conceptual umbrella of Sustainable Development Goals and resilience thinking
• Addresses key challenges such as climate change, land-use change, urbanization, resilience, complexity, adaptive system thinking, and economic development, with an operational, policy-planning approach toward peripheral, rural, and disadvantaged areas and landscapes
• Applies a comparative approach, deriving general notions and operational outcomes from comparative cases and quali-quantitative studies with extensive geographical coverage and specific quantitative techniques