Environmental management as an Undergraduate Programme of study in Nigerian Universities: Challenges and prospects

Abstract

Despite the fact that there is an increase in the number of Universities (public and private) in Nigeria, few of them embrace Environmental Management as an undergraduate programme. Such attitude is probably attributed to interdisciplinary nature of the programme, which seemingly makes it a programme without a defined vision and mission, lack of background history and particular ancient human initiator like other ancient sciences, ignorance of what the specialists stand to offer at local, national and international levels, and so on. However, this paper revealed various benefits of Environmental Management which includes making available trained environmental management graduates to tackle various environmental challenges, boosting environmental educationists in our communities, cheaper to employ than employing specialists that only touch few environment-related areas. In all, the comprehensive curriculum of Environmental Management enables the graduates to work with other related professionals in proffering ways of making our environment worth living in. This paper, thus, recommended that Universities should provide adequate resources and supports to the running of Environmental Management at undergraduate level. Also, Universities, public or private, should embrace Environmental Management programme for relevant research efforts towards temporal and spatial solutions to multifarious environmental challenges in human environment among other benefits.