Recommendations for building out mosquito-transmitted diseases in sub-Saharan Africa: the DELIVER mnemonic.

In sub-Saharan Africa, most transmission of mosquito-transmitted diseases, such as malaria or dengue, occurs within or around houses. Preventing mosquito house entry and reducing mosquito production around the home would help reduce the transmission of these diseases. Based on recent research, we make key recommendations for reducing the threat of mosquito-transmitted diseases through changes to the built environment.

Crowding has consequences: Prevention and management of COVID-19 in informal urban settlements.

COVID-19 spreads via aerosols, droplets, fomites and faeces. The built environment that facilitates crowding increases exposure and hence transmission of COVID-19 as evidenced by outbreaks in both cool-dry and hot-humid climates, such as in the US prison system and dormitories in Singapore, respectively. This paper explores how the built environment influences crowding and COVID-19 transmission, focusing on informal urban settlements (slums).

Mapping changes in housing in sub-Saharan Africa from 2000 to 2015.

Access to adequate housing is a fundamental human right, essential to human security, nutrition and health, and a core objective of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Globally, the housing need is most acute in Africa, where the population will more than double by 2050. However, existing data on housing quality across Africa are limited primarily to urban areas and are mostly recorded at the national level.

Developing a common framework for integrated solid waste management advances in Managua, Nicaragua.

This article describes the municipal solid waste management system in Managua, Nicaragua. It updates an initial profile developed by the authors for the 2010 UN-HABITAT publication Solid Waste Management in the World's Cities and applies the methodology developed in that publication. In recent years, the municipality of Managua has been the beneficiary of a range of international cooperation projects aimed at improving municipal solid waste management in the city.

Indicators linking health and sustainability in the post-2015 development agenda.

The UN-led discussion about the post-2015 sustainable development agenda provides an opportunity to develop indicators and targets that show the importance of health as a precondition for and an outcome of policies to promote sustainable development. Health as a precondition for development has received considerable attention in terms of achievement of health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), addressing growing challenges of non-communicable diseases, and ensuring universal health coverage. Much less attention has been devoted to health as an outcome of sustainable development and to indicators that show both changes in exposure to health-related risks and progress towards environmental sustainability.

Comparative analysis of solid waste management in 20 cities.

This paper uses the 'lens' of integrated and sustainable waste management (ISWM) to analyse the new data set compiled on 20 cities in six continents for the UN-Habitat flagship publication Solid Waste Management in the World's Cities. The comparative analysis looks first at waste generation rates and waste composition data. A process flow diagram is prepared for each city, as a powerful tool for representing the solid waste system as a whole in a comprehensive but concise way.