The Lagos Environment Story: Seven Years of Rethinking How a Megacity is Living

Seven years into Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s administration, Lagos’ environmental story is less about whether the city’s long-standing challenges have disappeared and more about how the state has changed its approach to managing them. From drainage and waste management to climate resilience, urban greening and environmental enforcement, the focus has increasingly shifted towards building systems designed to cope with the pressures of a growing megacity. Victoria Ojiako writes When Babajide Sanwo-Olu took the oath of office as Governor of Lagos State on May 29, 2019, he inherited more than Africa’s most celebrated commercial city. He inherited its contradictions. Lagos was expanding economically while becoming increasingly difficult environmentally. Its population continued to grow. Developments pressed harder against wetlands and waterways. Thousands of tonnes of refuse entered the waste stream daily. Roads and concrete replaced permeable land. Climate change complicated rainfall patterns. Coastal geography ensured that the Atlantic, lagoons, rivers, creeks and tides would remain permanent participants in the city’s development story. A Shift in How Lagos Manages Its Environment Seven years later, perhaps the fairest way to assess the environmental record is not to ask whether those problems have disappeared. They have not. Lagos still floods. Waste collection still occasionally breaks down — badly enough that Commissioner for the Environment and Water Resources, Tokunbo Wahab, publicly apologised in June 2026 for recent evacuation failures and acknowledged that performance during the preceding months had been poor. Pollution remains a concern. Development continues to create tension around drainage corridors and wetlands. And a city producing between 13,000 and 14,000 tonnes of waste every day cannot plausibly declare victory over sanitation. The more serious question is different: Has Lagos changed the way it thinks about these problems? Increasingly, the evidence suggests that it has. What used to be treated largely as sanitation has expanded into something approaching a broader philosophy of urban environmental resilience. Drainage is no longer merely about clearing roadside gutters shortly before the rains. Waste is increasingly discussed not simply in terms of evacuation but in the language of recycling, recovery, circular economy and conversion. Trees are not simply ceremonial objects planted on an environmental day but are being geo-tagged and monitored. Climate change has migrated from conferences into planning documents, financing mechanisms and infrastructure discussions. Wetlands, floodplains and drainage rights of way have become matters over which government is prepared to make politically difficult decisions. The Numbers Behind The Change The numbers tell part of the story. At the 2025 ministerial briefing, the state reported that 12 primary drainage channels covering 32.5 kilometres had been restored from 2023, while 84 secondary channels totalling 96 kilometres were restored in 2024. Government also reported the removal of 1,141 contraventions affecting drainage rights of way. When another period of unusually intense rainfall produced widespread flash flooding in June 2026, Sanwo-Olu approved dredging and maintenance of an additional 28 primary drainage channels. None of those figures means Lagos can no longer flood. What they demonstrate is that the state increasingly regards drainage as permanent urban infrastructure rather than seasonal housekeeping. Waste management tells another part of the story. From Waste Evacuation To Circularity For decades, Lagos effectively operated a linear model: collect waste and take it somewhere else. But “somewhere else” eventually fills up. The Lagos Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan itself identifies inadequate waste collection, uncontrolled dumping and pressure on ageing landfill infrastructure as serious environmental challenges, while proposing waste conversion and treatment as part of the longer-term response. That shift towards a circular economy may eventually become one of the more consequential environmental changes of the period. Because the real transformation occurs when plastic ceases to be merely rubbish, organic material becomes compost, recovered materials return to manufacturing and landfill is progressively reserved for what genuinely has no further productive use. Climate policy has similarly become more structured. The Lagos Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan identifies sea-level rise, extreme rainfall and extreme heat as the three major climate-impact drivers confronting the state and lays out 33 adaptation projects around infrastructure, communities and crisis response. More recently, in August 2026, Lagos introduced a Climate Defence and Catalytic Fund intended to attract private investment into climate-resilient and low-carbon projects. That movement—from climate advocacy towards climate finance—is important. Adaptation costs money. Drainage costs money. Coastal protection costs money. Wastewater treatment costs money. Green infrastructure costs money. A city facing climate risks measured in decades cannot depend solely upon annual government appropriations. Greening A Growing City Then there is urban greening. By June 30, 2026, LASPARK said 13,401 trees had been planted towards an annual target of 20,000, with the trees geo-tagged and local councils involved in their subsequent care. Again, the important number five years from now will not be 13,401. It will be how many survived. That distinction captures what environmental legacy should mean. It cannot merely record activity. It must measure durability. The Difficult Question Of Enforcement Perhaps nowhere has that distinction been more controversial than environmental enforcement. Properties have been affected. Structures have come down. Drainage setbacks have been recovered. Businesses have been sealed for noise and pollution violations. Illegal development has been confronted along watercourses and floodplains. To those affected, enforcement can feel harsh. And government has an obligation to ensure that every intervention is technically justified, procedurally fair and blind to status. But Lagos also faces a physical reality no political argument can repeal. Water needs somewhere to go. A wetland performs a function whether or not a developer considers the land valuable. A drainage corridor remains a drainage corridor even after somebody erects a building over it. The long-term environmental question is therefore whether government is prepared to protect the city from today’s politically convenient decisions that become tomorrow’s disasters. What Still Needs To Change There are still shortcomings. Primary waste collection needs improvement. Environmental data should become far more accessible. Planning and environmental approvals need tighter integration. Wastewater infrastructure requires enormous expansion. Air-quality monitoring needs wider coverage. Flood-risk communication should become increasingly scientific and measurable. Enforcement must be consistent enough that no one suspects there are different environmental laws for different classes of Lagosians. But a legacy need not mean perfection. Sometimes legacy is a change in direction. Seven years after 2019, there is a discernible attempt to move Lagos from reactive environmental sanitation towards integrated environmental management. From evacuation to circularity. From clearing drains to protecting drainage systems. From planting seedlings to monitoring green infrastructure. From talking about climate change to financing resilience. From accepting environmental abuse as the inevitable price of urban growth to insisting that development itself must recognise environmental limits. That change in thinking may ultimately matter more than any individual project. Because Lagos will continue growing. Another administration will come. Commissioners will change. Population pressures will intensify. Rain will fall. Waste will be generated. The Atlantic will remain where it is. The environmental legacy, therefore, cannot be that somebody finally conquered nature. It must be that Lagos became better organised to live with it.