Mitigation Strategies to Environmental Degradation in Nigeria

Abstract

Our environment is naturally blessed with dynamic resources to include vegetation, waters, soils and animals etc. Naturally, vegetation change, rivers are polluted, soil erodes and species are depleted all courtesy of human activities. While this is on the increase, some potentially more potent and dynamic activities on top of these already dynamic natural processes are surging up. Man who is at the center has dramatically altered much of nature and its natural environment through a process which is not new because it has been on for very long. One significant dilemma in that transformation is that nature has been destroyed sharply over the last two centuries. Today, the natural environment is being progressively destroyed with bulldozers and forests (species) felled by machine or handheld saws and reduced to small remnants of its original extent. To substantiate this, by mid-1970s (after the drought that caused serious degradation in Africa), humans had drastically increased the rate at which world?s forest cover and soils are destroyed. Over the last century development has claimed almost all fringes of major towns. If we have observed one thing common between the human interaction and the nature, it is that our inability to sustainably manage the natural environment is often quite clear. On the notion that efforts to stop further deterioration are never late, Myers (1992) noted ?we still have half of all tropical forests that ever existed?. Although this paper is theoretically sounded, its aim is to propose sustainable mitigation strategies to Nigeria?s rising environmental degradation. Considering this all, it is recommended that hybrid options combining indigenous and current externally developed approaches (which are mostly incompatible with the environment and cultures of Nigeria) should be produced and utilized to combat degradation in the country.

Key words: environmental degradation, mitigation, natural resources, Nigeria