The industrial sector in Burkina Faso faces two significant energy challenges access to efficient energy sources that are also renewable. Pyrolysis and gasification are emerging as conversion pathways that exploit available agricultural and industrial biomass. Pyrolysis has been adopted successfully, whereas gasification failed without getting beyond the experimental stage. This article assesses potential barriers to the adoption of gasification based on interviews with the stakeholders of the energy sector (users, NGOs, policy makers). We use pyrolysis as a benchmark to point out the barriers to adoption. The hierarchical analysis process (AHP) method was applied to identify the most significant barriers to the adoption of gasification. Twenty-seven barriers were identified and prioritized in two dimensions and five categories “technical”, “economic and financial”, “socio-cultural and organizational”, “political, governmental and institutional”, and “ecological and geographical” barriers. The category of socio-cultural and organizational barriers emerged as the most critical in the adoption of gasification. This category deserves special consideration to go past the pilot installation stage and adopting this technology.

Although access to sanitation has been recognized as a fundamental human right, 3.6 billion people do not enjoy this right globally. In this group, the practice of unhealthy sanitation behaviors, such as open defecation (OD), is very common. To alleviate this problem, several governments in low-income countries have adopted Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS). This is a participatory approach focused on ending OD and promoting good hygiene behaviors in target communities. This approach is centered around and highly depends upon a given community’s willingness to adopt the practices it advocates. However, the determinant factors in a community’s acceptance or refusal of these practices during and after CLTS implementation remain unclear. The aim of this paper is to highlight and categorize these factors to increase the sustainability of the approach. To achieve this, a study was conducted in the central-western region of Burkina Faso, where CLTS has successfully been deployed. We began this study by drawing a list of possible determinants through a literature review and grouping them into six categories. This enabled us to set up an evaluation matrix with scores for each factor and data collection tools. Scoring was based on the number of positive respondents for that factor. Data were then collected at the institutional, regional, local, and household levels from CLTS stakeholders to identify context-specific factors that underpinned behavior change in the surveyed villages. The literature review revealed six categories of acceptance factors. In our study, the importance of these factors according to our respondents were ranked in descending order as follows: environmental (C1 = 592), social (C2 = 390), governance (C4 = 247), territorial (C6 = 189), economic (C3 = 15), and technological (C5 = 0). The most frequently discussed factors obtained included the understanding of the health and economic consequences of OD (C1, score = 550); the popularity and reputation of Open Defecation-Free (ODF)-certified villages (C6, score = 179); men’s desire to protect their wives’ privacy (C2, score = 138); and women’s understanding of the adverse effects of OD on their children’s health (C2, score = 119). Incorporating the acceptance factors found in this study into future CLTS interventions will improve the effectiveness of the approach and increase the sustainability of ODF status in similar contexts.

Urban flooding poses growing social and economic risks in rapidly expanding cities, yet limited empirical evidence exists on how urban households perceive flood risk and how such perceptions vary spatially within cities. This study examines flood risk perception and its determining factors among households in Ouagadougou (capital city of Burkina Faso), recurrently affected by severe flood events. Using survey data collected from 2,459 households across the city’s 12 districts, a composite Flood Risk Perception Index is constructed and analyzed in relation to socio-economic and environmental variables through multinomial logistic regression, complemented by spatial statistical analysis. The results reveal a heterogeneous and ambivalent perception of flood risk: while most households tend to underestimate the likelihood and potential impacts of flooding, the fear dimension reflects a heightened emotional sensitivity. Overall, 17.8% of respondents exhibit a high perception of flood risk, 41.6% a moderate perception, and 40.5% a low perception, with age emerging as a decisive factor. Spatial analysis identifies eight districts with significantly higher concentrations of perceived risk (p < 0.01). These findings highlight the importance of integrating public risk perception into urban planning and adaptation policies to enhance community resilience through targeted awareness, improved land-use planning, and vulnerability reduction measures.

Fisheries worldwide exhibit puzzling boom-and-bust cycles despite regulatory efforts, raising questions about what drives these oscillations. We investigate whether temporal delays in monitoring and decision-making contribute to system instability. Our model uses delay differential equations to track an exploiting population and its renewable resources, incorporating two distinct delays: one for perceiving resource status (${\tau }_2$) and another for implementing management responses (${\tau }_1$). We establish the existence, uniqueness, and positivity of solutions, then analyze equilibrium stability through linearization and Lyapunov–Razumikhin functions. The characteristic equation reveals Hopf bifurcations at critical delay thresholds. Numerical simulations across 1600 parameter combinations using MATLAB R2023b’s DDE23 algorithm quantify these transitions. The results show a critical threshold near 1.64 years (20 months): below this value, systems converge to a stable equilibrium, while above it, persistent oscillations emerge within 20–26 year periods. Unexpectedly, one large delay destabilizes less than two moderate delays summing to the same total, contradicting uniform improvement strategies. Convergence to limit cycles requires roughly 40 years, exceeding typical management horizons and potentially masking true system dynamics. The critical threshold lies within realistic administrative timescales, suggesting that institutional delays may substantially contribute to observed population fluctuations. These findings indicate that accelerating either monitoring or decision processes rather than providing modest improvements to both could better stabilize exploited resources.

The Central Sahel region faces an escalating terrorism crisis involving complex interactions between violent extremism and population displacement, compounded by climatic vulnerabilities affecting marginalized communities. This study develops a compartmental ordinary differential equation model capturing interactions between susceptible populations, active terrorist networks, and internally displaced persons, analyzed through stability analysis, bifurcation theory, and Sobol's global sensitivity analysis via extensive numerical simulations. The mathematical framework demonstrates well-posed structure with established existence and uniqueness properties, revealing that military interventions alone contribute less than twenty percent to sustainable terrorism reduction, while integrated approaches combining radicalization prevention and de-radicalization programs achieve over eighty percent effectiveness. The basic reproduction number $\mathcal{R}_0$ emerges as a critical threshold parameter with transcritical bifurcation at $\mathcal{R}_0 = 1$ delineating terrorism elimination from endemic persistence regimes, and time-dependent sensitivity analysis indicates optimal strategies require adaptive approaches transitioning from prevention focused early interventions to sustained rehabilitation programs. These findings provide quantitative support for counter-terrorism frameworks prioritizing socioeconomic development over purely military solutions, offering a pathway to sustainable stability in the Sahel.