We are pleased to announce a new Research Topic associated with CARMA in Frontiers in Sustainability, within the journal’s Circular Economy section:
Circular Economy and Sustainability in the Data Age
AI, Big Data, and Computational Methods for Measuring and Accelerating the Transition
The transition towards a circular economy requires reliable methods to observe, measure and assess changes in business practices, consumption, labour markets, material flows and public policy. At the same time, artificial intelligence, large language models, machine learning and new digital data sources are expanding the methodological tools available to sustainability researchers.
This Research Topic brings these two areas together and welcomes studies that use data-intensive and computational methods to examine circular economy and sustainability. It originates from two complementary event series: CARMA, the International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics and the Symposium on Circular Economy and Sustainability. Authors who presented at either event are encouraged to submit substantially extended versions of their work. Nevertheless, the call is open to all researchers and is not restricted to conference participants.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Measuring and indexing circularity using composite indicators, ESG measures and alternative data
- Large language models, natural language processing and text analysis applied to circular economy discourse and behaviour
- Google Trends, search-engine and social-media data for monitoring sustainable consumption, demand and attitudes
- Web-scraped data, professional platforms and online job advertisements for analysing green skills and labour demand
- Bibliometric, scientometric and topic-modelling studies of circular economy research
- Causal machine learning and machine-learning econometrics for evaluating sustainability and circular economy policies
- Data-driven public policy, e-government and smart-city applications
- Nowcasting material flows, sustainable consumption and other dimensions of the circular transition
- Data quality, validation, reproducibility and interpretability in computational sustainability research
- Algorithmic fairness and the responsible use of artificial intelligence in sustainability research
The Research Topic welcomes several types of contributions, including Original Research, Methods, Reviews, Systematic Reviews, Brief Research Reports, Data Reports, Perspectives, and policy- or practice-oriented articles. All submissions must fall within the scope of Frontiers in Sustainability and will be subject to the journal’s peer-review process. Publication fees apply to accepted articles.
The Topic Editors are:
- Pavlos Fafalios, Technical University of Crete
- Josep Domènech, Universitat Politècnica de València
- Georgios Tsironis, ETH Zurich
Manuscript submission deadline: 9 February 2027
Read the complete call for papers and submit your manuscript