Abubakar Zakariyya Al-Hasan1*, Abubakar Ibrahim Suleiman2, & Al-Hasan Fatimetu Olohigbe3 (AUTHORS)
*1Department of Urban & Regional Planning, Auchi Polytechnic, Auchi, Nigeria
2Department of Agricultural & Bioenvironmental Engineering Technology, Auchi Polytechnic, Auchi, Nigeria
3Department of Public Administration, Auchi Polytechnic, Auchi, Nigeria
*Corresponding Author’s Email: alhasanaz@gmail.com
ABSTRACT: Urban growth in Nigeria proceeds through the conversion of vegetated and agricultural land into impervious built surfaces, and the environmental consequences of that conversion are increasingly well documented. What remains poorly articulated is the connection between the loss of green space and the structure of household energy consumption, and the implications of that connection for regional rather than purely municipal planning. This paper examines the relationship between urban growth, green space dynamics, and household energy demand in Nigeria through a structured synthesis of published land cover analyses, energy access assessments, and urban climate studies covering the period from 2016 to 2025. The paper uses documented multi-decadal land cover trajectories for Nigerian cities as its empirical anchor, and reads them against the evidence on urban heat, cooling demand, and household energy behaviour. Three findings emerge. First, the rate of vegetation loss in Nigerian urban systems is severe, sustained, and concentrated in the peri-urban belt, with one well-documented case recording a fall in vegetation cover from over fifty-five percent to under fourteen percent of municipal area across four decades. Second, this loss operates on household energy consumption through a thermal channel that raises cooling demand and through a substitution channel that removes fuelwood and shade resources from low-income households. Third, the spatial scale at which these processes operate is regional rather than municipal, because peri-urban conversion occurs across local government boundaries and because energy systems and labour markets are organised at regional scale. The paper argues that the appropriate planning response is a regional green-space and energy framework and sets out its components. Limitations arising from the synthesis design and from the uneven geographic coverage of the Nigerian evidence base are stated explicitly.
Keywords: Urban growth; Green space; Household energy; Regional planning; Land cover; Heat Island