Oil and Gas Pipeline Infrastructure and Sustainable Development in the Global South

In the entire chapter, key concepts of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG), the resilience of onshore oil and gas pipelines, the Global South, and the impact of the oil and gas sector on the UNSDGs will be discussed. The problematic nature of operating onshore oil and gas pipeline infrastructure, and ensuring security resilience whilst fulfilling the (UNSDG) are critical issues. It acknowledges the struggles faced by many nations in achieving the UNSDG 2030 targets, due to several reasons, especially the oil producing nations in the Global South such as Nigeria (Dodd and Merwe in The Political Economy of Underdevelopment in the Global South: The Government-Business-Media Complex, Chams, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Riggs, 2015). This chapter argues that the ineffective management of oil and gas pipeline infrastructure in Nigeria and the Global South is tied to geopolitical threats, poor governance, and everything in between, and disentanglement from the UNSDG framework. The focus of the UNSDGs is on the sustainable utilisation and management of natural resources and their impact on the infrastructure and the natural environment. A sustainability driven oil and gas pipeline infrastructure security strategy would play an important role in reinforcing the commitment of the Global South to infrastructure security and thus achieve the UNSDGs. Nigeria, and indeed, countries in the Global South that focus on the UNSDG framework, would reshape their commitment to empirical insecurity data that will help oil and gas policy formulation and implementation. The second part of the chapter discusses the outlined concepts which are interrelated and critical for understanding onshore oil and gas pipeline infrastructure insecurity and its impact on local communities in the Niger Delta and vandalism.