Page:Niger Delta Ecosystems- the ERA Handbook, 1998.djvu/174

Environmental Impact of the Oil Industry These are a few and it is quite impossible to live in or to visit the Delta without being aware of the industry, which intrudes into all aspects of people's lives.

MANGROVE CONVERSION IN RIVERS STATE (NOW RIVERS AND BAYELSA STATES) BY SPDC ALONE

From the World Bank report of 1995.

15.4.2 ACCESS–ROADS

Roads required by the oil industry often give the incidental economic benefit to local people of providing access to agricultural areas and forests. Nonetheless, potentially they have three adverse environmental impacts.

Often creating additional hunting, gathering, logging and agricultural pressures on forest areas.

This is one of the most common faults of the oil industry. This is because preconstruction environmental impact assessments are not carried out (in order to guide design); and because, it seems, the roads are built on the cheap. Generally the roads act as dams blocking the free flow of water especially in the wet season. As a result hydrological systems are disrupted so that the associated ecosystems are altered. The most obvious manifestation of this is flooding which destroys farmland and kills forest. This situation is particularly bad where roads are built at right angles to the beach ridges which have formed coastal plains: here the creeks between the ridges are blocked. A very good example is the access road to the Mobile Qua Iboe oil terminal near Eket in Akwa Ibom State. It is by no means unusual for villages to be flooded in the wet season as a result of such roads.

Even where access roads do not encourage the wholesale destruction of the forest they cause irrevocable ecological damage by cutting a wide swathe through the vegetation so that not only is the forest fragmented but also ecological conditions are altered on either side. These alterations include changes in light, temperature and humidity. Ultimately increased light encourages a dense "jungle" of vegetation on each side of the road.

15.4.3 ACCESS–WATER

One of the most significantly adverse, but often overlooked, impacts of the oil industry is the alteration of hydrological conditions arising from the dredging and straightening of 172