Environmental Pollution Abatement and Control in Nigeria

From creation, man has enjoyed the environment and its resources in its unadulterated and unaltered state. Since the environment was just a creation of nature in the beginning and before creation, it was not legally protected. At creation, man was given dominion over the earth and its resources, and because man had not developed complicated environmental goals, the environment was never the focus of regulation, not even in the early post-creation era. As time went on, with the development of science and technology and the quest for development, man laid an unrelenting assault on the environment, necessitating the need for environmental protection laws. In this regard, the Nigerian government has, over the years, enacted several environmental laws in an effort to manage the environment for human survival as well as to conserve it for the use of future generations. This chapter discusses Nigeria’s legislation on the environment, broadly categorised into framework legislation, sectoral legislation and incidental legislation.