People’s Perception of Soil Erosion and Its Impact in Imo State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study constitutes a critical measure of comprehension among the local residents of various communities on how they view the causes and impacts of soil erosion; this is in view to designing a sustainable control measure against erosion. On the basis of gully erosion density determined from satellite imagery, thirty communities were selected from the twenty-seven Local Government Area of Imo State where One thousand, five hundred (1,500) semi structured (closed ended) questionnaire made up of fourteen (14) questions addressing the issue of soil erosion, its impact and remedial measures were randomly administered (50 copies in each Community). The observations were ranked and simple percentage/descriptive statistical tools were deployed to analyze the data so generated. The findings show that the majority (79.9%) of respondents have lived in the area for more than 30 years. Traders and farmers constitute the highest respondents. Respondents perceived loss of land, loss of vegetation, water pollution, stream sedimentation, declining soil quality and landslides as major environmental impacts. While erosion control levy, loss of land for farming, undermining of transport routes/bridges were considered as socio-economic impacts. They attribute soil erosion (gully) to civil works (road construction) and soil quality and slope as major factors of erosion The result further showed that the mean (4.0) for environmental impacts across the study area is greater than the criteria mean (3.5) which makes it very significant. It was also observed that communities in the northern part of the State consider soil erosion as environmental challenge while communities from the Southern and Central part of the State consider it as socio-economic.

Keywords: Soil, Erosion, Environmental Impacts, Communities, Farming