Food security remains one of the most pressing global challenges of the 21st century. Ensuring stable, equitable, and sustainable food systems is increasingly complicated by population growth, climate change, shifting patterns of land use, demographic change in rural areas, and evolving agricultural supply chains.
The challenge of achieving food security is closely connected to transformations in land systems, rural populations, and agricultural supply chains. Three dimensions represent interconnected frontier research priorities that underpin food system sustainability. Land use changes can affect agricultural productivity and the long-term availability of food resources. At the same time, population ageing in rural areas is reshaping agricultural labour forces, farming practices, and rural livelihoods. Evolving agricultural product circulation systems also play a critical role in ensuring efficient food distribution, reducing food loss, and improving access to food. Alongside these challenges, advances in technologies, data systems, agricultural practices, and governance approaches provide new opportunities for strengthening food system resilience and sustainability. Addressing these issues requires interdisciplinary perspectives and collaboration across local, regional, national, and global scales.
Existing scholarship predominantly focuses on isolated single dimensions of food security, while the interactive mechanisms, coupled effects, and coordinated governance of land use transition, rural population ageing, and agricultural product circulation are rarely systematically examined. To address this critical research gap, this Collection seeks to integrate the three dimensions and promote in-depth interdisciplinary academic dialogue.
We welcome contributions and academic communications from scholars across diverse disciplines, including rural geography, agricultural economics, public management, agronomy, and demography.
This Humanities and Social Sciences Communications Collection welcomes research on the challenges, innovations, and solutions related to food security. This Collection embraces diversified rigorous research paradigms and methodological innovations and we encourage studies adopting multiple empirical and technical approaches, including case study analysis, econometric modeling, and 3S (GIS, RS, GPS) technology applications, to interpret and address food security issues from multi-perspective and multi-scale dimensions.
We encourage submissions surrounding the following themes (but not limited to):
- Land use change and its implications for food production and food security
- Agricultural land management, protection, and governance
- Rural population ageing and its impacts on agricultural production and rural livelihoods
- Labour shortages, generational transitions, and agricultural adaptation
- Agricultural product circulation, logistics, and supply chain resilience
- Food loss and waste reduction across agricultural value chains
- Climate change adaptation and resilience in food systems
- Food security governance and policy development
- Interactions between land systems, demographic change, and food supply chains
- Regional and comparative studies of food security challenges and solutions
- Food security and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
- Data-driven, spatial, and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding food systems
- Equity, accessibility, and resilience in food systems
We particularly welcome interdisciplinary research and studies that address food security challenges in vulnerable, marginalized, or underrepresented communities. Submissions whose primary contribution is algorithmic, or technological development are outside the scope of this Collection.
