Ten hectares of the world’s forests are destroyed every minute, amounting to 4.9 million hectares a year. Between 1990 and 2005, 72.9 million hectares of forest vanished. Forests cover a total surface area of 3.69 billion hectares, or 30% of the Earth’s land mass.
These are the latest figures published by the FAO on 30 November 2011, which also reveal that the rate of net loss of forested land is speeding up, rising from 4.1 million hectares between 1990 and 2000 to 6.4 million hectares between 2000 and 2005.

Nigeria is currently the largest oil producer in Africa and the sixth largest in the world, producing around 2.7 million barrels a day (2006 figures). The Nigerian economy is heavily dependent on the oil business, which represents 20% of the country’s GDP.
Since the 1950s, oil extraction and exploitation has had disastrous effects on the environment and the country’s ecosystems, which has over 800 km of coastline.
Thanks to its temperate climate, the coastal region has the most vegetation, particularly mangrove forests, marshlands and rainforests. The ecosystem of the mangrove forests, a large part of which is located in the area around the Niger Delta, covers an estimated area of between 500,000 and 850,000 hectares.

The latest report (August 2011) by UNEP, the UN environment programme, revealed the seriousness of the environmental damage caused by the oil industry in Nigeria, which was much greater than previously thought.

The key points identified by the report are alarming: broad areas of terrain that were apparently not at risk are in reality threatened by subsoil contamination; “drinking” water used by at least ten Ogoni communities is contaminated by high percentages of hydrocarbons, while in one village well water is contaminated by benzene; furthermore, massive leaks from oil pipelines have seriously compromised the vegetative cycle of the mangrove forests, whose roots, in turn, create the necessary environment for the reproduction of many species of fish. While reclamation of isolated portions of land could be completed in five years, for the marshy areas of the mangrove forests this is forecast to take 30 years.


More details:
http://fig.net/pub/figpub/pub36/chapters/chapter_8.pdf
http://www.fao.org/forestry/9361-09579546562fe91d71ca7d19eaf4a4f9b.pdf

Download image: Niger River Delta, Nigeria
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