Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a preemptive tool used by engineers, environmental consultants and planners to avoid the most likely adverse consequences of development projects. As a planning tool, EIA should curb the harmful effects from all stages of a project lifecycle. Landslides and flash floods are the most common problems faced by Malaysians almost yearly due to rapid development, especially that involving modification of watercourses, clearing of land and projects on hill slopes. Despite such issues, existing legislation and new guidelines have been enacted by the Malaysian government and must be followed by any proposing project team before starting development projects. The Department may have accepted an EIA report of the project. Still, several developments may have neglected the guidelines, especially during construction involving earthworks and exposure of the surrounding environment, place and people to a high risk of disaster caused by mishaps and accidents. The incidence of landslides and flash floods as reported in newspapers, journals, reports and books since 1919 is explored in this study to determine the details of the losses and locations. Despite the enactment of the new EIA law, landslides and flash floods continue to occur. This situation justifies the need to revise the approach based on sizes and include other factors, namely, the risk indices for disaster to happen and the effectiveness of EIA in reducing disaster risks in projects.

This paper reports the outcome of a thermal comfort study that assessed the satisfaction of occupants with their surrounding thermal conditions. The study was carried out in 10 mosque buildings around lowland Nibong Tebal, Penang and highland Cameron Highlands, Pahang. It involved determining the compliance level of thermal comfort parameters (i.e. air temperature, relative humidity and air speed) at lowland and highland and establishing relationships between ventilation systems with predicted mean vote and predicted percentage of dissatisfied at lowland and highland according to ASHRAE Standard-55. The study was conducted from 1200h to 1700h/1730h to assess the thermal conditions of the 10 mosques during Zohor/Friday and Asar prayer times. During prayer times, an active ventilation system was in operation, while before and after prayer times, only passive ventilation (windows and doors) was available. Overall, findings indicated that better thermal comfort conditions occurred during prayer time at highland compared with those at the lowland, with the thermal sensation conditions of mosques in the former 'slightly warmer' to 'slightly cool' and in the latter 'slightly warm' to 'hot'. Moreover, most mosques at lowland did not provide good thermal comfort because the percentage of dissatisfied was high compared to that at highland.

Results show that the mean concentrations of the nine indoor air contaminants in M1, M2 and M3 did not exceed ICOP's limits, except for the ozone concentration in M3 that exceeded the limit at 0.150 ppm. We conclude that the concentration levels of indoor air contaminants in the studied mosques are in compliance with Malaysia's ICOP and the non-compliance issue with regard to the ozone concentration in one of the mosques is due to the mosque's location in a busy coastal and marine area.

Ground level ozone (O3) is the most significant secondary air pollutants in Malaysia, and this air pollutant exhibited different variations during daytime and nighttime due to differences in photochemistry. This utilizing seven variables (O3, NO2, NO, SO2, PM10, temperature, and relative humidity) secondary data acquired from the Air Pollution Division, Department of Environment Malaysia. The nighttime data (7 p.m. – 6 p.m.) on March and December 2015 were used to represent the dry and wet months, respectively. Box and whisker plots were used to show the variation of nighttime O3, NO2, NO, SO2, PM10, temperature, and relative humidity during the dry and wet months. Results suggested that there are variations among the selected variables between dry and wet month with temperature, O3, NO2, and PM10 showed higher value during dry month compared to wet month. Meanwhile, relative humidity, NO, and SO2 showed the opposite result.

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