Oni, Samuel

Department of Geography, University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria, E-mail: iyiolaoni@yahoo.com

Strategic management of coastal disasters: human dimensions

Excessive human activities, over-exploitation of resources and uncontrolled land use planning has disrupted the normal and natural coastal shoreline processes. This phenomenon has led to increased sea level rise, ecological imbalance, erosion, flooding, pollution, ocean surge, subsidence and submergence with eventual havoc and catastrophes, especially coastal disasters in Nigeria.

Several remedial management efforts have been made in the past through ad hoc management plans and individual assessment. Whereas, strategic coastal disaster management requires an understanding of the factors and processes at work in the coastal morphogenic system for possible management, prediction and offset, as well as in the development of realistic and credible policies for mitigating change. This paper applies strategic management options, which provides tool, through which policies, plans, programmes are evaluated for potential environmental impacts in order to anticipate the consequences of decisions, and appropriately address coastal disasters at the earliest stage of decision making. It further provides major ingredient of integration in human dimension, which involves data and data base, institutional arrangement, international agreements and harmonization of environmental measurements. This paper demonstrates the feedback configuration of the global change system; and acknowledges paradigm shift to goal seeking, with requisites of a range of alternative actions, uncertainties, consequences, tolerance, and performance scale. Formalization of this provides a deeper understanding of the human dimension of global change. In essence, accepting the need for a reflexive representation of humankind in global change; a computer algorithm which represents the processes which the goal-seeking system uses to pursue its goal was devised. This paper suggests a functional coastal management agency, which pursues a responsible policy of sustainable use and management of the coastal environment, backed up by visionary political determination, leadership and courage. It further advocates:

- coastal protection movement which seeks to terminate the overexploitation of coastal resources.

- mobilizing for improving the understanding of and exploring the global environmental processes.

- collective actions from concept to best practices including monitoring effects of change, strict enforcement and comprehensive socio-environmental impact assessment for sustainable coastal development.