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 socioecological and socioeconomic 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 socioeconomic 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.
- 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, also including extensive geographical coverage and specific quantitative techniques
Luca Salvati is an Associate (staff) professor of applied economics and economic statistics at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Since 2001 he has been staff researcher at the National Council for Research in Agriculture and the Analysis of Agricultural Economics (CREA). He is an expert in official statistics, spatial statistics, Geographic Information Systems and Remote sensing applied to socioeconomic and environmental issues. He has conducted studies on topics of economic statistics, urban economics, regional demography, and sustainable development, using exploratory multivariate statistics and geographic information systems for decision support. He has held courses in Economic Statistics (University of Rome Tor Vergata), Basic Mathematics (University of Rome La Sapienza), Multivariate Statistics (University of Roma Tre), Regional Economics (University of Camerino, University of Eastern Piedmont), Strategic Evaluation of environmental impact (University of Roma Tre). He has supervised master's and doctoral theses and has published more than 30 printed books and over 600 scientific publications in English.
