Health risks from environmental degradation in the Niger Delta, Nigeria

© The Author(s) 2016. Local communities within oil producing countries in Africa often face formidable environmental challenges that generate conflicts and concerns around exploitation, environmental impact, and health risks. A key feature of these concerns has been the paucity of effective risk communication mechanisms and the impact this has on the public understanding of risk. Risk communication has been identified as a significant factor in explaining why the health consequences of environmental degradation remain unabated in oil producing communities. This paper evaluates health risk communication in the oil rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The study is based on 69 interviews conducted in the Niger Delta region. The paper argues that the health of the local population is being impaired by risk incidences relating to oil and gas exploration activities, the effects of which are amplified by inadequate communication of health risks to the public. The study argues for and suggests ways in which health risk communication processes can be improved in the Niger Delta. A multi-dimensional framework for public health risk communication is developed as a means of advancing understanding, practice, and policy

Biofuels and the role of space in sustainable innovation journeys

This paper aims to identify the lessons that should be learnt from how biofuels have been envisioned from the aftermath of the oil shocks of the 1970s to the present,and how these visions compare with biofuel production networks emerging in the 2000s. Working at the interface of sustainable innovation journey research and geographical theories on the spatial unevenness of sustainability transition projects,we show how the biofuels controversy is linked to characteristics of globalised industrial agricultural systems. The legitimacy problems of biofuels cannot be addressed by sustainability indicators or new technologies alone since they arise from the spatial ordering of biofuel production. In the 1970-80s, promoters of bioenergy anticipated current concerns about food security implications but envisioned bioenergy production to be territorially embedded at national or local scales where these issues would be managed. Where the territorial and scalar vision was breached, it was to imagine poorer countries exporting higher-value biofuel to the North rather than the raw material as in the controversial global biomass commodity chains of today. However, controversy now extends to the global impacts of national biofuel systems on food security and greenhouse gas emissions, and to their local impacts becoming more widely known. South/South and North/North trade conflicts are also emerging as are questions over biodegradable wastes and agricultural residues as global commodities. As assumptions of a food-versus-fuel conflict have come to be challenged, legitimacy questions over global agri-business and trade are spotlighted even further. In this context, visions of biofuel development that address these broader issues might be promising. These include large-scale biomass-for-fuel models in Europe that would transform global trade rules to allow small farmers in the global South to compete, and smallscale biofuel systems developed to address local energy needs in the South

Of embodied emissions and inequality: rethinking energy consumption

This paper situates concepts of energy consumption within the context of growing research on embodied emissions. Using the UK as a case study I unpack the global socio-economic and ecological inequalities inherent in the measurement of greenhouse gas emissions on a territorial basis under the international climate change framework. In so doing, I problematise questions of distribution, allocation and responsibility with regards to the pressing need to reduce global GHG emissions and the consumption that generates them. I challenge the disproportionate emphasis that energy policy places on supply as opposed to demand, as well as its overriding focus on the national scale. Consequently I argue that any low carbon transition, in addition to a technological process, is also a geographical one that will involve the reconfiguration of "current spatial patterns of economic and social activity" (Bridge et al., 2013:331), as well as relationships both within countries and regions and between them