Flooding is one of the catastrophic natural hazards worldwide that can easily cause devastating effects on human life and property. Remote sensing devices are becoming increasingly important in monitoring and assessing natural disaster susceptibility and hazards. The proposed research work pursues an assessment analysis of flood susceptibility in a tropical desert environment: a case study of Yemen. The base data for this research were collected and organized from meteorological, satellite images, remote sensing data, essential geographic data, and various data sources and used as input data into four machine learning (ML) algorithms. In this study, RS data (Sentinel-1 images) were used to detect flooded areas in the study area. We also used the Sentinel application platform (SNAP 7.0) for Sentinel-1 image analysis and detecting flood zones in the study locations. Flood spots were discovered and verified using Google Earth images, Landsat images, and press sources to create a flood inventory map of flooded areas in the study area. Four ML algorithms were used to map flash flood susceptibility (FFS) in Tarim city (Yemen): K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), random forests (RF), and eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). Twelve flood conditioning factors were prepared, assessed in multicollinearity, and used with flood inventories as input parameters to run each model. A total of 600 random flood and non-flood points were chosen, where 75% and 25% were used as training and validation datasets. The confusion matrix and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) were used to validate the susceptibility maps. The results obtained reveal that all models had a high capacity to predict floods (AUC > 0.90). Further, in terms of performance, the tree-based ensemble algorithms (RF, XGBoost) outperform other ML algorithms, where the RF algorithm provides robust performance (AUC = 0.982) for assessing flood-prone areas with only a few adjustments required prior to training the model. The value of the research lies in the fact that the proposed models are being tested for the first time in Yemen to assess flood susceptibility, which can also be used to assess, for example, earthquakes, landslides, and other disasters. Furthermore, this work makes significant contributions to the worldwide effort to reduce the risk of natural disasters, particularly in Yemen. This will, therefore, help to enhance environmental sustainability.

Earth fissures are potential hazards that often cause severe damage and affect infrastructure, the environment, and socio-economic development. Owing to the complexity of the causes of earth fissures, the prediction of earth fissures remains a challenging task. In this study, we assess earth fissure hazard susceptibility mapping through four advanced machine learning algorithms, namely random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), Naïve Bayes (NB), and K-nearest neighbor (KNN). Using Qa’ Jahran Basin in Yemen as a case study area, 152 fissure locations were recorded via a field survey for the creation of an earth fissure inventory and 11 earth fissure conditioning factors, comprising of topographical, hydrological, geological, and environmental factors, were obtained from various data sources. The outputs of the models were compared and analyzed using statistical indices such as the confusion matrix, overall accuracy, and area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUROC) curve. The obtained results revealed that the RF algorithm, with an overall accuracy of 95.65% and AUROC, 0.99 showed excellent performance for generating hazard maps, followed by XGBoost, with an overall accuracy of 92.39% and AUROC of 0.98, the NB model, with overall accuracy, 88.43% and AUROC, 0.96, and KNN model with general accuracy, 80.43% and AUROC, 0.88), respectively. Such findings can assist land management planners, local authorities, and decision-makers in managing the present and future earth fissures to protect society and the ecosystem and implement suitable protection measures.

The mining industry is a significant asset to the development of countries. Ghana, Africa’s second-largest gold producer, has benefited from gold mining as the sector generates about 90% of the country’s total exports. Just like all industries, mining is associated with benefits and risks to indigenes and the host environment. Small-scale miners are mostly accused in Ghana of being environmentally disruptive, due to their modes of operations. As a result, this paper seeks to assess the environmental impacts of large-scale gold mining with the Nzema Mines in Ellembelle as a case study. The study employs a double-phase mixed-method approach—a case study approach, consisting of site visitation, key informant interviews, questionnaires, and literature reviews, and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) analysis method. The NDVI analysis shows that agricultural land reduced by −0.98%, while the bare area increases by 5.21% between the 2008 and 2015 periods. Our results show that forest reserves and bare area were reduced by −4.99% and −29%, respectively, while residential areas increased by 28.17% between 2015 and 2020. Vegetation, land, air, and water quality are highly threatened by large-scale mining in the area. Weak enforcement of mining policies, ineffective stakeholder institution collaborations, and limited community participation in decision-making processes were also noticed during the study. The authors conclude by giving recommendations to help enhance sustainable mining and ensure environmental sustainability in the district and beyond.

In Myanmar, two expatriates have started infected by COVID-19 pandemic on 23 March in 2020 and COVID-19 period was divided into the two periods by the data of patients, from starting July 29, no more infected people found till August 19. Myanmar citizen think that there will be no more new COVID-19 cases, they started running their daily work, not following precaution methods. Unfortunately, the number of patients increased more and more, starting from 20th August. The period between 23rd March and 19th August was regarded as COVID-19 first wave and the period starting from 10th August was COVID-19 second wave by Government. In Myanmar, numbers of developed city are fewer than rural townships. Infrastructures of townships are same and most people, living in rural townships are not rich and they didn’t have saving money in Banks and they are depending on their monthly salaries. During pandemic period, general workers faced with unemployment problem and difficulty in daily expenses. Some volunteers helped daily expenses to poor people in COVID-19 first wave. In second COVID-19 wave, volunteers cannot help many families. This paper focused on COVID-19 pandemic impact on Public psychological consequences, Economy, Educational dimension and the prospects after pandemic.