Women Contributions to Sustainable Environments in Nigeria

The number of people on the earth, their distributions across the globe, consumption pattern and technologies they use, determine their relevance on the environment. That is, man uses the environment as a resource bank, a habitat and as a sink for wastes. But to correct the ills of the environment, we need to know and understand the environment. To understand the environment, we need to study it. To study the environment with the required precision, we need effective techniques. However, in the world of finite and non-renewable resources, the need to maintain our environment in a sustainable way cannot be overemphasized. This is even more crucial in settings where poverty, population pressure, vagaries of weather, etc. have meant increasing demand on the environment. In particular, societies, such as Nigeria, women are the traditional custodians of the environment their roles are hardly documented nor appreciated. Consequently, most measures that are designed to ameliorate, mitigate and reverse the deleterious impact of man on his environment tend to by-pass women. The very low level of successes of ‘man-centered intervention projects’ does not match the resources expended. To succeed, they need to appreciate the important role of gender relations, in particular women, in the maintenance and sustenance of the milieu as the home of man will loom large. This critically demands a radical departure from the current status quo to a system that places women at the nexus of environmentally friendly measures. In this paper; a framework for the documentation and appreciation of the contribution of women to a myriad of environmental problems is put forward. This framework appreciates the ‘place’ to wit, the socio-cultural and physical milieu that women have to grapple with in foresting healthy environmental management in Nigeria. There is, therefore, need for environmental security for future generations especially as the global environmental change affects the capacity to achieve sustainable development