Sudden or progressive change in the environment adversely affects the lives or living conditions of people who may have been displaced from their origin. When environmental degradation occurs or sudden onset hazards impact vulnerable areas, people may be forced to move and relocate to areas that then require new infrastructure. The new infrastructure should be built to be resilient and strong enough to endure the impact of future natural hazards.

Excluded people hold the least power to influence decision-making whilst decisions regarding construction are usually made with people who hold significant relative power. Normally excluded people should be consulted regarding potential environmental impacts and regarding their personal needs and dependencies on the local environment.

Air pollution
Soil pollution
Water pollution
Loss of biodiversity and ecosystems
Natural Resource depletion
Soil erosion

Riparian erosion due to the extraction of sand (sand mining) for the construction of sand filters.

Damage to sensitive aquatic ecosystems – affecting flora and fauna breeding, oxygen levels, sunlight, water temperature, food chains.

Instream sand dredging causes substantial destruction of aquatic ecosystems and riparian erosion, by creating large changes in the channel morphology. Impacts include bed degradation, bed coarsening, lowered water tables near the streambed, channel instability, and bank erosion.

Depletion of sand in the streambed and along coastal areas causes the deepening of rivers and estuaries, and the enlargement of river mouths and coastal inlets. It may also lead to saline-water intrusion if it is near to the sea. Dredging can destroy breeding and feeding zones for fish and other aquatic creatures leading to local extinctions.

Careful site selection.
Seek alternatives to sand.
Seek alternative treatment to sand filtration.
Identify more sustainable/less impactful sand sources.
Control the amounts of sand extracted from river banks.

Careful site selection for dredging – assessing the impacts on aquatic ecosystems. Seek alternatives to sand wherever possible e.g. recent technologies reprocessing processing plastics to replace sand in construction, or seek more sustainable/less impactful sources. Control the amounts of sand extracted from river banks. Control the amounts of sand that people extract for the construction of sand filters and verify any changes in the channel morphology. Implement other types of water treatment processes at the household level with a lower impact on the environment.

Riparian erosion is one of the major causes of sediment and contaminant load to streams, degradation of riparian wildlife habitats, and land loss hazards. Land and soil management practices are implemented as conservation and restoration measures to mitigate the environmental problems brought about by riparian erosion. This, however, requires the identification of vulnerable areas to soil erosion.

Because of the complex interactions between the different mechanisms that govern soil erosion and the inherent uncertainties involved in quantifying these processes, assessing erosion vulnerability at the watershed scale is challenging and requires the use of computer models.

Lessons from Fort Cobb Reservoir Experimental watershed in southcentral Oklahoma can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479717301639#:~:text=Riparian%20erosion%20is%20one%20of,habitats%2C%20and%20land%20loss%20hazards.&text=The%20environmental%20features%20used%20as,%2C%20lateral%20inflow%2C%20and%20discharge

Extraction of sand from rivers is controlled and limits of extraction are set according to the river properties

Prevention of environmental damage

Time, resources and expertise for site selection and sourcing alternative materials.