20.500.12556/DKUM-99208 Quantifying circularity and sustainability in EU agricultural systems development and application of a composite index This study develops the Agriculture Circularity and Sustainability (ACS) Index, a composite framework for assessing and monitoring circularity and sustainability in national agricultural systems. The framework integrates environmental, societal, economic, and food waste categories and enables systematic comparison across EU Member States using publicly available Eurostat and FAOSTAT data. Indicators were selected based on relevance to the Farm to Fork Strategy, data availability, and cross-country comparability. The analysis covers the period 2020−2023, with overall data completeness exceeding 97 %. The results reveal substantial variation across EU agricultural systems. Higher ACS Index values are associated with balanced performance across multiple sustainability categories rather than dominance in any single dimension. Spain, Austria, and Slovenia achieve the highest overall scores, while several intensive and export-oriented systems combine strong economic performance with weaker environmental or food waste outcomes. Within the Society category, higher scores are associated with more balanced self-sufficiency across food groups, whereas smaller, import-dependent systems tend to perform less favorably because of limited domestic production capacity. Temporal analysis shows that the highest- and lowest-performing country groups remain relatively stable over the study period. Sensitivity analysis shows that alternative weighting and indicator-selection assumptions mainly affect mid-ranked countries without changing the overall interpretation of performance. Spearman's rank-correlation analysis indicates limited redundancy among the 28 indicators, with no pair reaching the predefined potential redundancy threshold. The ACS Index provides a transparent, reproducible, and sensitivity-tested framework for comparative assessment and monitoring of circularity and sustainability transitions in EU agri-food systems. circular agriculture agricultural sustainability ACS index composite index farm to fork strategy krožno kmetijstvo kmetijska trjnost sestavljeni indeksi strategija od kmeta do mize true false true Elsevier Inc. Angleški jezik Slovenski jezik https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/environmental-and-sustainability-indicators © 2026 The Authors Članek v reviji 2026-08-07 10:25:25 2026-08-07 10:25:26 2026-08-08 03:08:39 0000-00-00 00:00:00 2026 0 0 18 str. [article no.] 101434 Vol. 31 Sep. 2026 0000-00-00 Zaloznikova NiDoloceno apc 2026-06-02 2026-07-23 2026-07-27 631:66 287206403 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101434 2665-9727 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2665972726003235?via%3Dihub 1 8aea1052-9239-11f1-a6bf-00155d0001be https://dk.um.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=209037 1-s2.0-S2665972726003235-main.pdf 1-s2.0-S2665972726003235-main.pdf 1 A52FCB5D9F19EDFE060968FA57C4D2ED 1246bf5bbf48e811549bac0ad54ac7612265d9638940b5dae4b4d198705a4067 e0eeec87-9239-11f1-a6bf-00155d0001be https://dk.um.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=209039 Fakulteta za kemijo in kemijsko tehnologijo 0 0 0