**1. Introduction**

The transgressive mud coastal zone is a fragile ecosystem, full of vast resources of minerals, foods, and energy but not without scenes of often conflicting uses. Presently, the uncontrolled and overexploitation of natural resources, vis a vis the climate change impacts pose a great threat to the economic prosperity and thereby resulting in environmental nightmares portending a lot of dangers for the generations to come [1]. This environment has witnessed a lot of degradation resulting from several years of oil exploitations and explorations. People's livelihood and their social well-being have often been affected adversely resulting from changes in the environment. Meanwhile, government over the years has dashed the hope of the inhabitants for protection. Bursting the petroleum pipeline by the people in an attempt to fight back, thereby disrupting the activities of the oil companies ended

up compounding the challenges in their environments which eventually leads to oil pollution. Fishing is the major occupation of the predominant group of people (the Ilajes) in the coastal zone. Their settling pattern just like the Ijaws along the coast is in such a way that their houses were constructed with wood and were suspended on water.

This fragile ecosystem poses a delicate balance with the inhabitants in the area. The rate of environmental degradation in this region, as a result of anthropogenic pollution and climate change, is rapidly pushing the region towards ecological disasters. Uncontrolled reclamation of lands has been the last hope of the people due to lack of land to build settlements. Rivers, which are the people's only means of transportation, have been a nightmare, as a result of flood continual modifications of the rivers, thereby rendering them useless. Economically, human activities have been crippled. More also, shortage of land for development, flooding, siltation, occlusion and other environmental problems are associated with the hydrology and natural terrain of the area. Mangrove swamp forest (vegetation) reduces the impacts of floods, exacerbated by land subsidence, coastal erosion, and rising sea level. Also, the diurnal tidal movement modifies the floods which continuously impairs the river courses with significant impacts on the economy and human life patterns [2].

The transgressive Mud inter-tidal zone typically has a slope of 1:50, while beach elevation averages 3 m above the mean low water level. The coastline lies between Ajumo and the Benin river-estuary on the northwestern flank of the Niger delta [3]. The transgressive mud coastline runs from the northwest to southeast in the Ondo State coastline. About 90% of Nigeria's foreign exchange is derived from crude oil and gas, which is one of the major natural resources in this region. Other natural resources domiciled in this region include: fisheries, touristic resources, mangroves and forest.
