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Successful project delivery for sustainable building construction (SBC) has been linked to certain features. Previous studies have emphasised the need to improve SBC practice in South Africa. The purpose of this study is to explore the SBC features for project delivery in South Africa.

A structured questionnaire elicited the primary data from 281 built environment professionals, mainly in South Africa’s Gauteng province. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used for the data analysis. This study used the principal component analysis technique to ascertain the principal SBC features.

Three components of SBC features, namely, sustainable resource use and compliance, sustainable waste minimisation and recycling and sustainable designs and materials, were developed from the principal component analysis. The factor loadings of the constituent variables ranged from 0.570 to 0.836. The reliability of each component was evaluated, and the results were 0.966, 0.931 and 0.913.

The revelations from this study will aid the decision-making of the relevant stakeholders towards establishing improvement initiatives and mitigating the reluctance to shift from conventional building methods and poor knowledge sharing of SBC benefits.

This is one of the most recent South African studies that sheds light on the components of a successful SBC deployment. The findings of this study added to knowledge by confirming three fundamental features of SBC. This study recommends adequately considering the principal features for successful SBC project delivery in South Africa.

With issues like increasing student dropout rates, low productivity and compromised quality, research in higher education is faced with a number of paralyzing challenges in India. This study aims to locate the role of toxic academic supervision in relation to decreased quality of research.

Following a sequential mixed method design, the research begins with a quantitative analysis, which is then followed by an in-depth qualitative exploration.

The results of mediation analysis in this study reveal that students who experience toxic research supervision have a weak sense of identification and are also poor at self-disclosure, which results in increased distress and reduced engagement and productivity. Moreover, identification and self-disclosure have also been found to partially mediate the relationship between toxic supervision and distress. Furthermore, a thematic analysis of this study provides a detailed behavioral profile of toxic academic supervisors and highlights the consequences of such supervision with regard to students' well-being and productivity.

In terms of theoretical contributions, the study provides evidence that the concept of toxic leadership has applicability outside of the organizational context; in the educational sphere as well and that the toxic leadership scale can be successfully used to assess the severity of toxic supervision within the academic domain, and corrective actions can be taken to mitigate the effect of such supervisory style on students.

The study not only highlights the repercussions of toxicity in academia and higher education but also provides a detailed and in-depth description of the personality traits and behavioral idiosyncrasies of toxic supervisors, which can help in the early identification of toxic tendencies and can enable us to mitigate and prevent toxicity from the academic space and to ensure a conducive environment for students in higher education. Overall, the present research has important implications for researchers, academicians as well as policymakers.

The study is the first of its kind in terms of both, objective and methodology.

The purpose of this study was to define and outline areas prone to disease causing elements by analyzing the spatial distribution and concentration of toxic and essential elements in a section of the Voltaian sedimentary basin.

A total of 2,668 soil samples were analysed by the inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry technique and were re-appraised by comparing with baseline values of elements accepted globally to be in soils. The concentrations of arsenic (As), chromium (Cr), iron (Fe) and magnesium (Mg) were evaluated. Factor analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis multivariate techniques were used to identify the source patterns of the elements in the soils. The Getis-Ord Gi method was used to generate the optimised maps for these selected elements. These maps spatially defined and outlined high value clusters which imply potential pollution or areas with high background values (hotspots), whereas the low value clusters imply areas with low background values (cold-spots).

The multivariate analysis supports a dominant geogenic source of these heavy elements with obvious influences from variably metamorphosed mafic–ultramafic rocks known to have contributed to the deposition of sediments in the basin. The hotspots for As were located around Nalerigu and to the east of Nawchugu. A Cr hotspot was located to the east of Nawchugu with Cr cold-spots located within Nalerigu and Yunyuo. Fe hotspots were observed to the south of Nalerigu and the east of Nawchugu with Fe cold-spots around Yunyuo, Bongo-Da and Nagbo. The spatial maps demonstrated the presence of toxic and deficient areas of all the selected elements used in the investigation. Therefore, it suggested the likely health implications depending on the exposed elements, their pathways and recommended the usefulness of using the results displayed in the spatial maps to guide in devising appropriate remediation techniques.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study the distribution of elements and the possible effects it may have on the health and livelihoods of those residing in these areas.