Solid waste management (SWM) is one of the key responsibilities of city administrators and one of the effective proxies for good governance. Effective SWM mitigates adverse health and environmental impacts, conserves resources, and improves the livability of cities. However, unsustainable SWM practices, exacerbated by rapid urbanization and financial and institutional limitations, negatively impact public health and environmental sustainability. This review article assesses the human and environmental health impacts of SWM practices in the Global South cities that are the future of global urbanization. The study employs desktop research methodology based on in-depth analysis of secondary data and literature, including official documents and published articles. It finds that the commonplace SWM practices include mixing household and commercial garbage with hazardous waste during storage and handling. While waste storage is largely in old or poorly managed facilities such as storage containers, the transportation system is often deficient and informal. The disposal methods are predominantly via uncontrolled dumping, open-air incinerators, and landfills. The negative impacts of such practices include air and water pollution, land degradation, emissions of methane and hazardous leachate, and climate change. These impacts impose significant environmental and public health costs on residents with marginalized social groups mostly affected. The paper concludes with recommendations for mitigating the public and environmental health risks associated with the existing SWM practices in the Global South.

The boom in technological advances in recent decades has led to increased demand for rare earth elements (REEs) (also known as rare earth metals) across various industries with wide-ranging industrial applications, including in the clean energy sector, but with some environmental, economic, and social footprint concerns. This paper reviews the complexities of the production, consumption, and reuse or recovery of REEs, presenting current trends in terms of potentials and challenges associated with this. This paper in particular focuses on the supply, demand, and (environmental and economic) sustainability of REEs, as a subset of critical raw materials. It does so via a critical stocktaking of key discussions and debates in the field over the past 15 years up until now, through a thematic analysis of the published and gray (policy) literature with a grounded theory approach. The paper finds that carefully balanced lifecycle sustainability assessments are needed for assessing the respective dimensions of the extraction, processing, and reuse or recovery methods for different types of REE sources and supplies to meet current and future demands. It furthermore diagnoses the need for taking into account some shifts and substitutions among REEs also for reasons of cost and locational supplies for the security of supply. Finally, the paper provides some overall policy recommendations for addressing current problems, with a conceptual framing of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Understanding factors associated with flood incidence could facilitate flood disaster control and management. This paper assesses flood susceptibility of Perlis, Malaysia for reducing and managing their impacts on people and the environment. The study used an integrated approach that combines geographic information system (GIS), analytic network process (ANP), and remote sensing (RS) derived variables for flood susceptibility assessment and mapping. Based on experts’ opinion solicited via ANP survey questionnaire, the ANP mathematical model was used to calculate the relative weights of the various flood influencing factors. The ArcGIS spatial analyst tools were used in generating flood susceptible zones. The study found zones that are very highly susceptible to flood (VHSF) and those highly susceptible to flood (HSF) covering 38.4% (30,924.6 ha) and 19.0% (15,341.1 ha) of the study area, respectively. The results were subjected to one-at-a-time (OAT) sensitivity analysis to verify their stability, where 6 out of the 22 flood scenarios correlated with the simulated spatial assessment of flood susceptibility. The findings were further validated using real-life flood incidences in the study area obtained from satellite images, which confirmed that most of the flooded areas were distributed over the VHSF and HSF zones. This integrated approach enables network model structuring, and reflects the interdependences among real-life flood influencing factors. This accurate identification of flood prone areas could serve as an early warning mechanism. The approach can be replicated in cities facing flood incidences in identifying areas susceptible to flooding for more effective flood disaster control.