Environmental risk has become an area of major concern and research, drawing special attention. This study on the environmental risk assessment (ERA) of Dar es Salaam Municipal Solid Waste comes at a time when the Government of Tanzania is becoming increasingly concerned about dealing with high levels of pollution from municipal solid waste (MSW). The paper employed the Driving force-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) model to establish an environmental risk indicator system and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to calculate and analyze risk values, based on the actual situation of MSW in the city of Dar es Salaam. It lists several measures that have been taken in response to the current significantly high levels of pollution, which have assisted in maintaining the environmental risk index (ERI) at a medium level (0.4–0.6) during the period from 2006–2017. However, these measures have not been adequate enough to manage the external pressure. The ERI has been increasing gradually, calling for timely formulation of demand-specific waste management policies to reduce the possibility of reaching the critical point in near future. With the use of the DPSIR model for ERA, this study has become highly valuable, providing empirical justification to reduce environmental risk from MSW, which is one of the main sources of environmental pollution in the urban areas of developing countries.

In this study, we used bands 7, 4, and 3 of the Advance Himawari Imager (AHI) data, combined with a Threshold Algorithm and a visual interpretation method to monitor the entire process of grassland fires that occurred on the China-Mongolia border regions, between 05:40 (UTC) on April 19th to 13:50 (UTC) on April 21st 2016. The results of the AHI data monitoring are evaluated by the fire point product data, the wind field data, and the environmental information data of the area in which the fire took place. The monitoring result shows that, the grassland fire burned for two days and eight hours with a total burned area of about 2708.29 km². It mainly spread from the northwest to the southeast, with a maximum burning speed of 20.9 m/s, a minimum speed of 2.52 m/s, and an average speed of about 12.07 m/s. Thus, using AHI data can not only quickly and accurately track the dynamic development of a grassland fire, but also estimate the spread speed and direction. The evaluation of fire monitoring results reveals that AHI data with high precision and timeliness can be highly consistent with the actual situation.

There is increasing focus on the difficult challenge of realizing coordinated development of production, living and ecological spaces within the regional development process. An ecological–production–living space evaluation index system was established in this study based on the concept of ecological, production and living spaces (EPLSs), the relationship between land use function and land use type and the national standard of land use classification. The aim of this study was to reveal the driving forces and patterns of variation in EPLSs in Inner Mongolia from 1990 to 2015. The results indicated that Inner Mongolia is mainly dominated by ecological space, followed by production space. Production and living spaces are mainly distributed to the south of the Greater Hinggan–Yinshan–Helan mountain ranges. Spatial changes in EPLSs were accelerated with prominent regional differences, with declining ecological area and increasing living and production spaces. Regional urbanization and industrialization were identified as the driving forces for change in EPLS in Inner Mongolia. It is hoped that the findings of this study can provide rational guidance for management of land use and coordinated development of EPLSs within Inner Mongolia.

Debris flow events often pose significant damage and are a threat to infrastructure and even livelihoods. Recent studies have mainly focused on determining the susceptibility of debris flow using deterministic or heuristic/probabilistic models. However, each type of model has its own significant advantages with some irreparable disadvantages. The random forest model, which is sensitive to the region where the terrain conditions are suitable for the occurrence of debris flow, was applied along with the steady-state infinite slope method, which is capable of describing the initiation mechanism of debris flow. In this manner, a random-forest-based steady-state infinite slope method was used to conduct susceptibility assessment of debris-flow at Changbai mountain area. Results showed that the assessment accuracy of the proposed random-forest-based steady-state infinite slope method reached 90.88%; however, the accuracy of just the random forest model or steady-state infinite slope method was only 88.48% or 60.45%, respectively. Compared with the single-model assessment results, the assessment accuracy of the proposed method improved by 2.4% and 30.43%, respectively. Meanwhile, the debris-flow-prone area of the proposed method was reduced. The random-forest-based steady-state infinite slope method inherited the excellent diagnostic performance of the random-forest models in the region where the debris flow disaster already occurred; meanwhile, this method further refined the debris-flow-prone area from the suitable terrain area based on physico-mechanical properties; thus, the performance of this method was better than those of the other two models.

Landslide identification is an increasingly important research topic in remote sensing and the study of natural hazards. It is essential for hazard prevention, mitigation, and vulnerability assessments. Despite great efforts over the past few years, its accuracy and efficiency can be further improved. Thus, this study combines the two most popular approaches: susceptibility analysis and change detection thresholding, to derive a landslide identification method employing novel identification criteria. Through a quantitative evaluation of the proposed method and masked change detection thresholding method, the proposed method exhibits improved accuracy to some extent. Our susceptibility-based change detection thresholding method has the following benefits: (1) it is a semi-automatic landslide identification method that effectively integrates a pixel-based approach with an object-oriented image analysis approach to achieve more precise landslide identification; (2) integration of the change detection result with the susceptibility analysis result represents a novel approach in the landslide identification research field.