The research aims to identify the requirements of the digital economy in rural areas whose fulfillment fosters the development of climate-smart agriculture and encourages population inflows into these territories. To this end, it summarizes statistics from 20 countries with the highest levels of digital technology adoption in 2025. The authors constructed an economic-mathematical model to describe how the sustainability of rural development depends on the regulatory approaches to the digital economic development of these areas in 2025. The research concludes that the primary requirement for the digital economy of rural territories, one whose fulfillment promotes the growth of climate-smart agriculture and attracts people to rural areas, is the robustness of the legal and social institutions that support climate-smart agricultural practices in these regions. A regulation-enhanced forecast is presented, according to which, by 2035, the share of rural residents in the total population of the sampled countries is expected to rise to 28.23%, in contrast to the decline to 21.75% projected by an alternative regulation-neutral forecast. The resulting projections reveal the prospects for the sustainable development of rural territories depending on the regulatory environment governing climate-smart agricultural technologies through 2035.