EUC Global Connection – Nigeria
The Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change brings together geographers, physical scientists, social scientists, humanities researchers and artists whose innovative research seeks to advance sustainability and social justice. Using field-based science, policy analysis, critical social theory, planning skills, geomatics, and cultural and arts-based approaches, our researchers drive action to address the world’s environmental and urban challenges.
EUC researchers are engaged in collaborative relationships, projects and partnerships with colleagues and institutions around the world. Here are the works we have been doing in Nigeria.
EUC Main Researchers in Nigeria
EUC Main Partner Institutions in Nigeria
EUC Research in Nigeria
EUC’s research connections with Nigeria are extensive and especially rooted in the political economy of oil extraction and scientific studies of environmental change.
Professor Adeyemi Ousola
Professor Adeyemi Ousola’s work has significantly contributed to the study of climate dynamics, water resources, and environmental sustainability in Nigeria. With a deep focus on the Niger Basin, he has explored the complex interaction between climate change, water flow conditions, and nonlinear dynamics, aiming to predict and mitigate the impacts of drought and other environmental stressors in the region. His research on these issues has included publications relating to flood events along the Lower Niger (using Google Earth), the impacts of a dam on the downstream Niger River, and modelling discharge in the Niger River Basin.
Beyond hydrology, Dr Olusola has extended his research into the socio-economic impacts of climate change. One of his current projects, funded by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) at the University of Ibadan, examines how climate change affects the mental health of farmers in transnational climactic zones. He has also received an additional $2 million from TETFUND which aims to understand how environmental stressors contribute to psychological distress and identify strategies to support affected communities that have challenges in accessibility to water in Southwestern Nigeria.
Dr Olusola has strong academic ties with several academic Nigerian institutions including the University of Ibadan and Adebisi Onabanjo University in Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria. His collaborative work spans multiple disciplines and includes authorship and editorship of several books on the geomorphological landscapes of Nigeria and remote sensing applications in African mountains.
Professor Anna Zalik
Professor Anna Zalik also has an extensive history of research and collaborations within Nigeria. Zalik has conducted field research in Nigeria since 2001, first during long-term dissertation research concerning the oil industry’s social regulation strategies in Nigeria and Mexico. Her scholarship, based on extended field research, offered one of the new millennium’s initial close and critical examinations of Shell Oil’s corporate social programs in Nigeria. Her work contributed to forging a new generation of scholarship comparing extractive industry activities in diverse sites internationally, including in Nigeria and Mexico, and Nigeria and Canada.
After joining York University, Zalik collaborated with Dr. Isaac Asume Osuoka, legacy FES’s first Vanier scholar and faculty PhD Alum, on a SSHRC-funded partnership development grant with the organization Social Action Nigeria concerning oil industry transparency discourse in Nigeria and the broader Gulf of Guinea. In conjunction with Social Action Nigeria, that partnership grant supported research in southern Nigeria, and an international conference in Abuja Nigeria in 2014. Some of the work emerging from the grant was published in a special issue of the journal Extractive Industries and Society in 2020.
