Effectiveness and sustainability of remedial actions for land restoration in Abeokuta urban communities, Ogun state, Nigeria

Abstract

Abstract The destructive impact of land degradation on social and economic endeavours of the residents of certain urban areas of Abeokuta communities in Ogun State, Nigeria calls for remedial actions to restoring the affected land areas. This becomes essential in order to ensure safe inhabitation and enhanced socioeconomic engagements of the residents. Taken remedial actions in this regard included the use of sandbags, debris and wood logs, rubbles and stones, construction of contours and drainages. While each of these actions, in one way or the other, effectively improves the degraded land, it was concluded that the use of rubbles and stones, and drainage construction were sustainably durable for land restoration on the premise that these actions does not allow for water logging or flooding in of the study area. It was however recommended that these sustainable remedial actions should rather be pro-actively taken for prevention of land degradation than being taken as degraded land restoration actions basically because it is much cheaper to prevent environmental degradation than to have the degraded land restored.