Who Cares About the Environment in Conflict-Hit Maiduguri? Education and Jobs Hold Clues

In the sprawling, conflict-scarred city of Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s Borno State, a decade of environmental strain is now being traced alongside the social profiles of the people who live there. A new quantitative study, published in SN Social Sciences, has examined how education, occupation, age, gender and place of residence shape residents’ environmental awareness, and how key environmental indicators moved between 2015 and 2024. The research, conducted by Benjamin Paul Hammajam and Ambrina Sardar Khan of the Department of Environmental Science at Integral University in Lucknow, India, offers one of the first structured attempts to connect who knows about environmental problems in a northern Nigerian city with what is actually happening to its forests, air, temperature and biodiversity.

Maiduguri presents an unusually demanding setting for this kind of research. The city has absorbed rapid urban growth while coping with the social and economic pressures of a prolonged insurgency, and its densely populated neighborhoods face mounting environmental stress as a result. Evidence linking residents’ environmental awareness to their socio-demographic characteristics has been scarce for urban northern Nigeria, where most environmental research has focused on the oil-polluted Niger Delta or on broad national assessments. By focusing on a single metropolitan council in the country’s northeast, the study fills a geographic and evidentiary gap that policymakers in the region have long had to navigate without local data.

The methodological core of the study is a quantitative cross-sectional survey of 200 respondents, combined with harmonised secondary environmental data covering the years 2015 to 2024. The researchers measured environmental awareness using a twelve-item instrument and then examined how awareness scores varied across socio-demographic categories. Categorical comparisons and regression models were used to test the associations, with a binary logistic regression retained only as a sensitivity analysis to check the robustness of the findings. On the environmental side, the reconstructed time series for deforestation, air quality index, temperature change and biodiversity were summarized descriptively, and detrended Pearson correlations were computed to explore how the different indicators moved together over the decade.

The results on the social side are strikingly uneven. Education and occupation emerged as the characteristics associated with environmental awareness, while awareness also differed across age groups. Gender and location, by contrast, were not statistically significant in the reported comparisons. This pattern suggests that in Maiduguri, environmental knowledge is not distributed evenly across the population but clusters around people whose schooling and working lives give them greater exposure to environmental information. The finding aligns with a wider literature on environmental literacy, which has repeatedly linked formal education and professional context to environmental knowledge, values and reported behavior, but it now has a concrete empirical anchor in one of Nigeria’s most environmentally pressured cities.

The environmental indicators tell their own directional story. The reconstructed series showed changes in deforestation, the air quality index, temperature change and biodiversity over the ten-year window. Two correlations stood out in the detrended analysis: a preliminary negative co-movement between deforestation and biodiversity, with a correlation coefficient of minus 0.90, and a positive co-movement between air quality and temperature, with a coefficient of 0.74. In plain terms, the data suggest that years in which forest loss accelerated tended to be years in which biodiversity declined, and that air quality and temperature tended to worsen or improve together. These are exactly the kinds of coupled dynamics that climate and land-use researchers have warned about at the global scale, now visible in a single city’s decadal record.

The authors are careful, and rightly so, about what these numbers can and cannot support. Because only ten annual observations were available for each environmental series, the correlations are descriptive and exploratory rather than causal or confirmatory. Short time series are notoriously vulnerable to spurious relationships, a problem long recognized in the statistical literature on regression with limited data, and detrending helps but does not eliminate the risk. The deforestation-biodiversity correlation of minus 0.90 is strong enough to be suggestive, but with ten data points it cannot establish that forest loss drove biodiversity decline, only that the two moved in opposite directions over the same period. Similarly, the air quality and temperature co-movement of 0.74 points to a shared trajectory that deserves longer monitoring rather than a settled conclusion.

There is also an important limitation on the survey side. Because the original item-level responses for the twelve-item awareness instrument were not retained, the researchers could not assess full-sample internal consistency, including Cronbach’s alpha, the standard measure of how well a set of survey items hangs together as a single scale. Environmental awareness is therefore treated as a researcher-developed composite, and all awareness-related findings are interpreted with this reliability limitation in mind. This kind of transparency is unusual and valuable: rather than presenting a clean but fragile result, the study flags exactly where the evidentiary floor is soft, inviting future surveys to preserve item-level data and replicate the socio-demographic patterns with a fully validated instrument.

The ethical and procedural scaffolding of the research is documented in detail. The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, received formal ethical clearance from the Institutional Ethics Committee and the Research and Development office of Integral University in December 2025 before the 2025 field survey, and obtained informed consent from all participants. All gathered information was anonymized for publication, and the authors declare no competing interests. The work received no external funding and was supported institutionally by Integral University, Lucknow, which assigned the manuscript a communication number for record-keeping after submission.

What the findings mean for policy is framed deliberately as context rather than proof. The authors present policy, governance and Sustainable Development Goal implications as contextual recommendations, not as statistically tested effects, which is an honest reading of a study that combines a 200-person survey with ten-year environmental series. Still, the practical signal is clear: if education and occupation are the strongest correlates of environmental awareness in Maiduguri, then awareness campaigns that ignore schooling and livelihood channels are likely to miss their mark, and targeted activities aimed at less-educated and differently employed residents could raise the baseline of environmental knowledge where it is lowest. The study’s support for continued environmental monitoring is equally pointed, since the decadal trends in deforestation, air quality, temperature and biodiversity can only be confirmed, or overturned, by longer and better-resourced data collection.

Maiduguri’s decade of environmental change, reconstructed here from fragmented secondary data, offers a rare window into how a rapidly growing city in an insecure region absorbs ecological pressure. The study does not claim that awareness alone will reverse deforestation or cool the air, and it explicitly avoids causal language where the statistics cannot bear it. What it does deliver is a paired diagnosis: a social map of who in the city knows about environmental problems, and a preliminary environmental record of what those problems look like on the ground. For a city rebuilding amid conflict, that combination of evidence, with its limitations stated plainly, is a starting point for the targeted awareness work and sustained monitoring that the Sustainable Development Goals demand, and a reminder that in data-scarce settings, careful and honest description is itself a scientific contribution.

Subject of Research: Socio-demographic determinants of environmental awareness and decadal environmental trends in Maiduguri, Nigeria

Article Title: Socio-demographic determinants of environmental awareness and decadal environmental trends in Maiduguri Metropolitan Council, Borno State, Nigeria

Article References: Hammajam, B. P., & Khan, A. S. (2026). Socio-demographic determinants of environmental awareness and decadal environmental trends in Maiduguri Metropolitan Council, Borno State, Nigeria. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 413. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01688-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01688-y

Keywords: environmental awareness, Maiduguri, Nigeria, deforestation, biodiversity, air quality index, temperature change, socio-demographics, cross-sectional survey, Sustainable Development Goals, urbanization, environmental monitoring