Restoration of Nigeria’s environmentally devastated oil-producing Niger Delta region could take up to 30 years, cost $1 billion and become the largest cleanup operation in history, the United Nations said Thursday. A landmark report from the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP) concluded that pollution from more than 50 years of oil operations in Nigeria’s Ogoniland region is more far-reaching than thought. The assessment, commissioned by the Nigerian government and funded by oil giant Shell, comes on the heels of the company admitting liability for two spills in Nigeria. Nigeria’s Niger Delta, the world’s third largest wetland, is diverse and rich with mangroves and fish-rich waterways. But oil drilling has turned it into one of the most oil-polluted places on Earth with more than 6,800 recorded oil spills, accounting for anywhere from 9 million to 13 million barrels of oil spilled, according to activist groups. But the environmental disaster has never received the kind of attention paid to last year’s oil catastrophe along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Amnesty International, which has researched the human rights impacts of pollution in the Delta, said people in the region have experienced oil spills on par with the Exxon Valdez disaster every year for the last half century. This has been going on for 50 years, with corruption, Neo Colonialism and the criminal Oil Corporations working together. The damage would take at least 50 years to remedy, but this will never happen-.
Shell's defeat is also important for the future in that it highlights the effectiveness of taking court cases in the main homeland of a Corporation.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/08/04/nigeria.oil.cleanup/
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