Mitigating the Ecological Consequences of Urban Renewal for Floral and Faunal Diversity in Nigeria: A Critical Narrative Review

Abstract

Nigerian cities are being remade through slum clearance, road and waterfront redevelopment, land reclamation and master-planned expansion, yet the ecological consequences of these renewal processes for plants and animals have rarely been examined as a coherent body of evidence. This critical narrative review synthesises and appraises literature on how urban renewal and associated redevelopment affect floral and faunal diversity in Nigeria and evaluates the strategies available to mitigate those effects. Peer-reviewed studies, together with essential institutional documents, were identified through structured keyword and Boolean searches of multidisciplinary scholarly indexes, supplemented by backward and forward citation tracing, and were appraised for design, scale, measurement validity and transferability. The evidence consistently shows that redevelopment and expansion in Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan and other cities have converted vegetated land, mangroves, swamps and floodplains into built surfaces, fragmented remaining green space and intensified urban heat. Field studies of birds, trees, amphibians and stream invertebrates indicate that urban sites generally lose species richness, particularly among forest-dependent and specialist taxa, while functional diversity and total abundance may be partly maintained by tolerant generalists. Vegetation structure, native tree cover and reduced human disturbance emerge as the most consistent local correlates of faunal diversity. Confidence in causal attribution to renewal specifically remains limited, because most studies are cross-sectional, rely on land-cover proxies rather than species data, concentrate on birds and trees, and rarely measure outcomes before and after identifiable renewal projects. Evidence on mitigation is largely transferred from other regions; avoidance of wetland and large-tree loss, native-dominated planting, connectivity planning and integrated impact assessment are the best-supported options, whereas offsetting and ornamental greening remain weakly evidenced in the Nigerian context. Governance failures, fragmented environmental assessment and displacement-driven renewal constrain implementation and raise equity concerns. Mitigating the ecological costs of renewal in Nigeria will depend less on novel techniques than on enforcing avoidance, embedding biodiversity baselines into project approval and generating longitudinal, multi-taxon evidence from Nigerian cities.