Assessing Circular Economy Transitions: Quantitative Approaches and Policy Implications

Unprecedented increases in the use of natural resources and materials call for a swift reshaping of production and consumption towards greater resource efficiency and circularity. The transition towards a circular economy is key to supporting the delicate balance between sustainability and human development while tackling the concurrent crises on climate, biodiversity, human health, and food and energy security.

However, the circular transition presents us with multiple fundamental challenges. Circular business models and lifecycles require structural changes in supply chains and production technologies both at the global and local scales. End-users’ consumption attitudes and preferences need to be readjusted and transformed into actual circular behavior. Public policies struggle to coordinate the variety and heterogeneity of actors involved and choose among the multiple transition strategies available.

Science should support all stakeholders, both in private and public spaces, providing guidelines on alternative options and tools to assess unintended adverse impacts. Quantitative analyses and modeling are key scientific contributions supporting the transition towards the circular economy by enabling policy design and evaluation, the assessment of business models profitability and industry-level impacts, the protection from rebound effects and Jevons paradoxes due to macroeconomic feedbacks, and the management of spillovers across commodities and industries.

This Research Topic thus aims at collecting recent advancements in the multi- and inter-disciplinary modeling of different and often alternative strategies for implementing the circular economy, and at assessing how these approaches account for all the mechanisms mentioned above.

The focus is particularly on quantitative approaches that are or could be applied to support policy design and to monitor the progress of the transition toward a circular economy. Specific questions include how to effectively model the macroeconomic impacts of circular economy strategies, how to integrate economic mechanisms with environmental impacts, and how to monitor the progress of circularity in lifecycles, supply chains, and business models across industries and commodities.

Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

Integration of Economic and Environmental Impacts:
• Interdisciplinary approaches combining economic mechanisms with environmental impacts, material flows, and life cycle assessments

Macroeconomic and Financial Modeling:
• Input-output, computable general equilibrium, and agent-based models
• Hybrid approaches addressing both monetary and physical flows
• Econometric and financial analyses of circular economy strategies

Circularity Monitoring and Supply Chains:
• Monitoring circularity in lifecycles, supply chains, and business models
• Modeling transitions towards circularity, including equilibrium modeling of waste streams

Policy Design and Implementation:
• Empirical analyses to support policy design for circularity
• Investments and transitions, including digital technologies and workforce skills

Cognitive, Social, and Funding Models:
• Models requiring changes in user behavior
• Mechanism design and monetization of externalities
• Public vs. private funding strategies

Comprehensive methodologies and reviews of all approaches

Keywords: Circular Economy, Sustainability, Environment-Economy Modeling, Economic Feedback, Material Efficiency, Policy Analysis.

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.