Environment Defined

The word environment, in every day usage, means surroundings, circumstances, or influences. Most people understand the term to mean the physical conditions of the landscape, including the topography, drainage, climatic conditions, and the vegetation of a given area or territory.


This is the physical environment or natural surroundings made up of land, water, and air, along with all the resources including the soil, plants, animals, and minerals found in them.


The second type of tangible or material environment is the human-made environment, which is basically the natural environment that has been modified or transformed by human activities.


In addition to these two types of tangible environments, there is a third type of environment, namely the socioeconomic environment, which encompasses the political environment. Often, it is this intangible environment that plays a major role in determining what proportion of the natural resources of a territory is used for the economic development of the territory and for the economic development of the territory and for the material benefit of the inhabitants.

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What is Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)?

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is an assessment of the effects of a proposed development on the physical, biological, social, and economic environment. The the development could be a policy, plan, programme, project, social, cultural or economic change, or environmental change.

It is an assessment that aims that aims to integrate environment into development in a manner that will bring about sustainable development.

Although EIA evolved in the USA in 1970 long before the United Nations report on sustainable development was published by the World Commision on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987, it was at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, 1992, that the need to intergrate environment into development globally was further underscored.

EIA is a tool for systematically evaluating impacts of a proposed development on people, other organisms, and on the physical, social, economic, cultural and aesthetic environment before a final decision is taken.

In addition to identifying the impacts, EIA considers various alternative options including the option not to undertake a development or not to make a change. It should clarify what a situation would be if there were no development or change, and what the impacts are for various alternative development options. It shouls be undertaken to provide environmental and social inputs into the project decision-making process.

Environmental Impact Assessment is therefore concerned with the continued welfare of people and the stewardship of nature. The practical objective of an EIA is to predict probable and potential changes in the environmental and social system resulting from a proposed project.

Thus, EIA is a process with the ultimate objective to provide decision makers with an indication of the likely consequences of their actions.

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Population and the Environment

Population is the total number of people who live in a specified area or territory such as a country, province, ethnic territory, or a town.

In the process of creating development, human beings transform and destroy the environment. The continued growing demand for resources by an ever-increasing population (population pressure) has created an age-long concern for the environment and the adequacy of resources for future generations (sustainable development).

The environment provides the resources needed for the existence and survival of human beings. It also provides the site for the physical presence of all living things. The environment serves as the sink for wastes. Human beings produce the greatest amount of waste.

With advances in technology, overexploitation of environmental resources become inevitable. Land degradation, soil erosion, droughts, flooding, sand dunes, etc. are evidence of the worsening state of the environment.

There is no problem in the relationship between living things and the environment as long as the total ecosystem made up of great variety of species remain balanced. Trouble begins when nature's balance is upset by a dominant species, usually the human population, or by natural disaster.

Recent studies of population-environment interactions therefore recognize land use and land cover change as a corner stone of the science of global environmental change, sustainablity, and increasingly, environment-and-development.

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Noise Pollution and its Health Effects

Noise is simply any form of unwanted sound. The unit of measurement is decibel (dB). Exposure to noise can cause a number of deletorios effects on humans and yet noise generation is one of the inevitable features of development.

There is ample experimental evidence that specific disorders such as cardiovascular disease, annoyance, speech interference at home and at work, and sleep disturbance can occur due to exposure to noise. Temporary and even permanent impairment to hearing can also result from prolonged exposure to excessive noise.

Research shows that decrease of working quality, increase of psychical tension, increase of blood pressure and pulse frequency, and biochemical effects such as increase in epinephrine, urine and serum Mg, protein, cholesterol plus decrease of erythrocyte Na and rennin are associated with a noisy work environment.

There are diffrent noise levels of dicomfort for different people. Generally, the human level of discomfort starts from about 100 dB, pain from about 120 dB, and damage to the hear drum will occur at 160 dB.

Different nations adopt different safety sound levels in different environment such as industrial workplace, open street, and a residential area.

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Environmental Law

It is easier to describe law than to define it. However, law has been described as the body of rules regulating the human conduct regarded as obligatory or binding by its members.


Environmental law are laws that are concerned with the protection of the natural resources of the environmental media - land, air and water - and the flora and fauna (plants and animals) which inhabit them.


The function of this branch of law is to regulate human conduct with a view to sustaining life, which is incontrovetibly the most important of all fundamental rights.


The content of environmental law is wide and extensive. It covers subject areas like water pollution, air pollution and land degradation, noise pollution, wildlife and natural resources conservation, pest control, fishery, environmental sanitation, solid waste management, land use and planning, matters of afforestation and deforestation, and desertification, among others.


Law is obviously not the only instument of social control in the society as there are others like public opinion, religion, and custom. Law is unique, especially within the the confines of the environment because its presciptions are backed with sanctions.


However, not all environmental problems are human generated. Granted the fact that some environmental problems are occasioned by factors outside the immediate control of humans, the role of law here is to ameliorate their impact by preventing aditional disturbances to the ecosystem that might be occasioned by human activities either by omision or commision.


Law combines a number of techniques in environmental protection to achieve sustainable developmwnt and these include the penal technique, the administative regulatory technique, and the grieviance-remedial technique.


The paramount social value which the law communicates, regulates, and reinforces is that of the survival of the society.


It has benn acknowledged that a massive pollution of the environment through despoilation of land, water and the air, by industrial waste, chemicals, oil, the dumping of refuse/garbage, the indiscriminate use of pesticides, and by any other means threathens the very conditions of social survival.


Law is apparently the most potent weapon that can be employed to regulate human activities with a view to sustaining social survival.

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