The world is increasingly recognizing that environmental challenges such as climate change, environmental degradation, unsustainable consumption and production practices, resource scarcity have a significant impact on economies and the people. Economies are under increasing pressure to reduce human and ecological risk factors such as resource scarcity and price volatility. In addition, the environment stands as highly potent in providing solutions for accelerated socio-economic transformation to solve leading challenges of food insecurity, poverty, unemployment, food waste, migration and implementation of global commitments. For effective implementation of global commitments and solutions to environmental challenges, there is need to re-focus our development pathways. If the ‘business as usual’ approach continues, countries will not be able to respond to the environmental challenges, thereby undermining the effective implementation of SDGs and other related global commitments. There are numerous environmental challenges that impact society, economy and environment such as unsustainable consumption and production, environmental displacement, antimicrobial resistance, sand and dust storm, unsafe nanomaterials, poverty, energy insecurity, unemployment, migration, loss of biodiversity, pollution, natural disasters such as fires and floods among others. Some of these challenges are long-standing but have not been paid attention to, such as land mismanagement and desertification causing sand and dust storms and displacement. Whilst some are persistent, others are emerging. Now is the time for national governments, the business sector and civil society to tackle these threats by adopting innovative approaches. Citations are important for a journal to get impact factor. Impact factor is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in the journal. The impact of the journal is influenced by impact factor, the journals with high impact factor are considered more important than those with lower ones. To increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals PrimeOA Publications top online publishing journals are indexed in different indexing and archiving services.