land Editorial Sustainable Rural Development: Strategies, Good Practices and Opportunities Ana Nieto Masot * and José Luis Gurría Gascón   Citation: Masot, A.N.; Gascón, J.L.G. Sustainable Rural Development: Strategies, Good Practices and Opportunities. Land 2021, 10, 366. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10040366 Received: 22 March 2021 Accepted: 23 March 2021 Published: 2 April 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Department of Art and Territorial Sciences, University of Extremadura, 10071 Cáceres, Spain; jlgurria@unex.es * Correspondence: ananieto@unex.es In 2020, a special issue titled “Sustainable Rural Development: Strategies, Good Practices and Opportunities” was launched, in which 16 papers were published. The aim of this monograph is to study a problem that is occurring on a global scale and, above all, in the most developed countries, which is the population emigrate from rural areas to urban areas due to the labour and service opportunities offered by the latter [1,2]. This is causing a demographic deterioration of rural areas due to the abandonment in large areas of numerous villages, and those that remain show high rates of ageing, masculinisation or low demographic growth [3–5]. In addition, and interrelated with this demographic deterioration, there was economic [6] and environmental degradation [7–9]. Rural areas are territories with increasingly lower purchasing power, job opportunities and services for the population [10] which are classified as “spaces in crisis” [11–13]. In addition, and due to the abandonment of agricultural holdings [14,15], it is causing problems such as the increase in desertification, deforestation and even risk phenomena such as forest fires [16–19]. The aim of this special issue was to present, on the one hand, contributions in which different initiatives or projects are managed to reduce the demographic, economic and social imbalances between rural and urban areas. On the other hand, it aimed to present some studies that highlight the weaknesses that certain projects are having in achieving the same objectives. The papers presented are very varied and provide cases in a wide variety of territories, in European, American or Asian regions where there are rural areas in crisis and, a review [20] on the opportunities that may arise for rural areas to introduce integration of technology such as Internet networks, telecommuting, distance-learning education, the use of electric cars, etc. to achieve development. There are strategies focused on achieving rural development through the promotion of activities complementary to agriculture. Agriculture was the predominant activity in rural areas until decades ago [21] and has become a minority activity due to the transformations of the global economy and its greater mechanisation [22] and it does not generate enough income to sustain the population in rural areas. For this reason, the agricultural sector should be complemented with other economic activities in rural areas, as recommended by organisations such as the EU [21–23] and the OECD [2,24–26]. Thus, there are papers in which different types of complementary activities, such as rural tourism, the revalua- tion of natural heritage, the promotion of agroecological products, the transformation of agricultural areas into industrial land, the introduction of ICTs and internet access in rural areas, improve their communications and teleworking or the design of sustainable housing that can fundamentally attract new settlers. In addition, some papers that have focused on initiatives with new models of development, such as Leader at European level or the design of smart villages, have been put forward. As a complement, other papers have focused on the design of indicator models to measure the sustainable rural development strategies. In the following paragraphs, the main results of the papers presented are detailed. In Spain, there are cases presented such as the strategies carried out in the rural and coastal communities of Galicia [27], where the aim has been to achieve complementary incomes for fishermen by means of the diversification of the Common Fisheries Policy aid Land 2021, 10, 366. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10040366 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land