Since the introduction of the Circular Economy in the 1990s,the management practice of circular agriculture has been rapid advancement.Based on the principles of sustainable agricultural development,circular agriculture has been the subject of numerous reports,which have evaluated and studied the development of this new agricultural practice at different scales.However,one of the most widely used methods of accounting for different forms of energy and resources—the emergy theory—has yet to be employed in evaluating circular agriculture.Emergy describes one kind of available energy that is used up in transformation,directly or indirectly,to make a product.It measures quality differences between forms of energy that are generated by transformation processes in nature,and that support work in natural or human dominated systems.In this study,the emergy analysis method was partly modified and specifically tailored for circular agriculture systems,and then used to evaluate the sustainability and economic benefits of ecosystem development.To validate the feasibility and quality of the improved emergy analysis method,we conducted assessments in four complex circular systems at Xingyuan circular agriculture demonstration site in the city of Fuqing,Fujian Province.We found that total production input could be substantially overestimated under the traditional emergy theory,as the systematic feedback emergy was accounted into total inputs.Further,the environmental stresses from the tremendous amount of wastes generated in the studied systems were not considered in the traditional emergy theory,and as a result,the sustainability of the conventional 'pig-only' farm was estimated to be 2.8%—11.52% higher than that of the studied circular systems.In contrast,the improved emergy analysis method could evaluate the sustainability of the circular systems more efficiently and accurately,as the most important advantage of circular agriculture—decreasing the total inputs and reducing environmental stresses by converting the systematic wastes into renewable resources—were factored into the new analysis.Furthermore,the improved emergy theory recognized the circular system as a whole by carefully defining the boundary conditions and energy fluxes in and out of the system,which reflects the real production processes both by design and in practice.According to our evaluation using the improved emergy method,the emergy sustainable indices(ESI) of the circular systems were improved by 23.44%—33.86% compared to that of conventional pig farming.The circular system of 'pig farm-biogas system-compost production-cultivation′ had the highest overall benefit among the four circular systems,as demonstrated by the highest ESI,lowest environment load ratio(ELR),and second highest emergy yield ratio(EYR),which was only slightly smaller than that of the circulating system of 'pig farm-biogas system-cultivation′.The circular agricultural system is essentially an interactive combination of multiple sub-systems.Its ecological benefits should be measured by the system efficiency rather than the length of the production chain.This is supported by our evaluation using the modified emergy theory: the 'pig farm-fire damp-compost production-mushroom farm-cultivation′ system,with the longest chain in all four studied systems,had the least ecological benefits.Further investigations into the model efficiency are required to improve flexibility and applicability of the improved emergy theory in larger areas or more complex systems.