article · Smart Construction and Sustainable Cities
Rapid urban expansion in coastal sedimentary basins complicates infrastructure development, particularly waste management. Combining the Delphi method, Analytical Hierarchy Process, and Geographic Information Systems produces a spatial decision-support model for sanitary landfill site selection in Uyo, Nigeria. In this humid region characterised by permeable geology and high rainfall, hydrogeological criteria carried the highest importance, accounting for 31.4 percent of the overall evaluation weight. Spatial analysis revealed that only 210.5 square kilometres, or 9.2 percent of the study area, is highly suitable for landfill engineering, primarily located within the outlying districts of Ikono, Ibiono, Uruan, and Etinan. Extensive buffer zones surrounding expanding residential settlements and drainage networks heavily constrain the remaining territory. Validated against ground-truth locations with 86.67 percent accuracy, this tailored spatial framework addresses the tendency of standard approaches to overlook groundwater vulnerability in tropical environments with limited baseline data.
Selecting incorrect landfill locations in wet, permeable landscapes threatens vital groundwater reservoirs that communities depend upon for drinking water. Traditional assessment models frequently underestimate these environmental hazards. By incorporating local hydrological and residential constraints, this methodology offers municipal planners and civil authorities a validated tool to prevent contamination while accommodating rapid urban growth in environmentally sensitive regions.
Urban planners, municipal waste management authorities, and environmental engineering consultancies can directly use this spatial framework for infrastructure planning. The methodology sits at an applied and tested stage, having undergone field validation with independent ground-truth data in South-South Nigeria. It provides an operational blueprint for civil engineering projects seeking to de-risk investments and ensure environmental compliance in data-scarce, tropical sedimentary basins.
AI-generated from the published abstract. Always read the original work before citing.
Abstract Rapid urban growth in the Global South makes it harder to choose infrastructure corridors, especially in sensitive coastal basins. This study introduces a spatial decision-support framework tailored to local conditions. It combines the Delphi technique, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to improve sanitary landfill site selection in Uyo and nearby areas in South-South Nigeria. The region sits on the highly permeable Benin Formation and gets heavy annual rainfall of 2,500 mm. Ten environmental experts participated in a three-round Delphi process to agree on key parameters, which were subsequently measured using a pairwise AHP matrix to ensure consistency (CR < 0.10). Hydrogeological factors, mainly Lithology and Soil Permeability (31.4%), were given the greatest weight, followed by infrastructure and proximity factors. Using Weighted Linear Combination (WLC), the spatial analysis showed a strong urban buffer effect: only 210.5 km 2 (9.2%) of the 2,289.41 km 2 area is classified as “Highly Suitable” for engineering, mostly in remote parts of Ikono, Ibiono, Uruan, and Etinan. The rest of the land is limited by required exclusion zones around growing peri-urban homes (1,000 m) and surface drainage networks (500 m). The model was checked with fifteen independent ground-truth points, showing an overall accuracy of 86.67% and a Cohen’s Kappa coefficient (ǩ) of 0.762, which means there was strong spatial agreement. The findings show that standard site selection methods often underestimate aquifer risks in tropical sedimentary areas. The protocol developed here offers a practical framework for infrastructure planning in humid, vulnerable regions with limited data.
This page summarises published work. The authoritative version sits with the publisher.
DOI: 10.1007/s44268-026-00098-6
Is something wrong with this record? Report it or request removal.
Discussion
Have you built on this work, tried to replicate it, or seen it applied in practice? Share what you know. Verified researchers and MARATTO™ domain experts can open a discussion, and any member can reply. Contributions are reviewed before they appear.
No discussion yet. Open the first thread.
New to MARATTO™? Create a free account.
