Copping with the Menance of Environmental Deterioration in Urban Slum Areas within Jos Metropolis, Nigeria

Abstract

Introduction Slums the places where poor people struggle to make aliving and bring up their families, and the places where about one third of the world's urban population live. (The challenge of slums: global report on human settlements, 2003) The importance of maintaining a healthy and sustainable environment cannot be overemphasized.The UN-HABITAT (2012), defines slum as any specific place, whether a whole city or a neighborhood, more than half of all households lack improved water, improved sanitation, sufficient living area, durable housing, secure tenure or combinations of two. Recently as maintained by Cities Alliance Action Plan (1999), slums are neglected parts of cities where housing and living conditions are appallingly poor. The case study conducted in Chengdu; China defined slums as "shanties in low-lying areas". Slums are home to the poorest of urban populations in Africa. The houses inhabited by slum dwellers are mostly decrepit, overcrowded, in neighborhoods that are prone to flooding &beset with poor sanitation & shortage of portage water (Emma-Ochu, et al., 2016).They are areas which little government attention in terms of provision or maintenance of public facilities and infrastructure is being felt. These are high-density squalid central city tenements to spontaneous squatter settlement without legal recognition which sprawl at the edge of cities. Currently, about 1 billion people live in slums, with most slum dwellers located in less developed countries, which accounts for about 30% of their urban population. The number of slum dwellers is projected to increase to 2 billion by 2030 and to 3 billion by 2050 if current trends persist (UN-Habitat, 2010; United Nations, 2015a), as cited by Mahabir,et al.,(2016).Available data reveal that the population of Nigeria has been increasing at an alarming rate. Our towns and cities are growing rapidly. The current urbanization rate of Nigeria is 5.5 percent per annum and the urban population was put at 50 percent in 2012 (Pepple, 2012a) as cited by Mallo, et al., (2015).The slum situation in Nigeria is already frightening for the reason that the proportion of people affected by slum conditions is such a significant element in sub-Sahara Africa. In 2012, the estimated population of 47 sub-Sahara African countries was 910.4million and of this, 167million were Nigerians. Of the 167million people in Nigeria, 61.1 percent were said to reside in slums (

Sustainable construction in the Nigerian construction industry: unsustainable practices, barriers and strategies

“…Furthermore, the analysis revealed "Excess energy", "Unsustainable technologies", "Non-management of health and safety of workers" and "Material waste" as the significant unsustainable practices, while other practices such as "Misuse of natural resources", "Poor governance", "Land misuse (erosion, desertification)", "Air pollution", "Comfort disturbance (discomfort to people)" and "Poverty and lack of alternatives" are insignificant in terms of their p-value. This means that efforts are not being made on construction sites in Nigeria to curb erosion and desertification, which reduces the productivity of land (Orewere et al, 2020) habitat destruction as the major source of soil erosion, material wastage, ecosystem destruction and desertification. The health and safety of workers are paramount to the availability of the workers for future projects.…”