The contributions reflect five major topics identified by the SIES (Strategic Initiatives for the Environment and Security) as having significant societal impact: optimal control in waste management, in particular the degradation of organic waste by an aerobic biomass, by means of a mathematical model; recent developments in the mathematical analysis of subwave resonators; conservation laws in continuum mechanics, including an elaboration on the notion of weak solutions and issues related to entropy criteria; the applications of variational methods to 1-dimensional boundary value problems, in particular to light ray-tracing in ionospheric physics; and the mathematical modelling of potential electromagnetic co-seismic events associated to large earthquakes.