2.1.1 Land expansion

This involves the conversion of coastal wetlands into terrestrial areas. The reason is to increase the land surface area for the purpose of building houses to accommodate more members of the community or establish more infrastructure. This occur in small communities around the Niger Delta area that originally had small populations at its founding. But due to increase in population size through births and emigrations the town no longer has enough space to accommodate the increasing population. This situation thus necessitated the reclamation of coastal areas to create more space for human habitation. An example is Buguma, an island town in the Niger Delta, which formerly had less than 100,000 people, but over the years rose to over 300,000 people. This situation made the local authority to cut down

#### Figure 1.

Map of Niger Delta Nigeria (circled) bordering the Atlantic Ocean has the biggest mangrove forests in Africa.

and sand fill a mangrove forest measuring about 4.2 million m<sup>2</sup> in 1984 (Figure 2). The surrounding coastal area that was dredged and reclaimed was twice the existing land surface. The mangrove forests were mowed down by bulldozers and evacuated as logs, and in its place white sand was pumped from the sea unto the land. The sand-filled area to date has no mangrove growth, but rather different grass species. Presently buildings have been erected on the site, which are occupied by some people. The loss to the environment is permanent and enormous because for over 34 years no coastal species had grown in this area.

The second example is another site known as Borikiri in the outskirts of Port Harcourt, the capital city of Rivers State. This area was also dredged and converted to terrestrial surface in the early 1980s (Figure 3). So far in this location thousands of houses had been built, which houses over half a million persons. The implication of these landscape reclamations is that the destruction of mangrove forests lead to a colossal loss of ecosystem services to the environment. Anthropogenic activities around the coast is detrimental to its sustainability because of the addition of pollutants and contaminants [5].
