Environmental Engineering Responses to Displacement and Environmental Stress in North East Nigeria: A Systems Analysis

This dissertation conducts an original systems analysis of the environmental engineering challenges created by the intersection of mass displacement, climatic environmental stress, and degraded infrastructure in North East Nigeria, developing a novel systems framework for designing environmental engineering interventions in humanitarian-to-development transition contexts. The North East zone confronts a unique configuration of environmental engineering problems where large-scale population displacement from conflict intersects with accelerating land degradation from desertification, declining surface water availability from reduced Lake Chad inflows, and severely disrupted water supply and sanitation infrastructure, creating compound environmental health risks for both displaced and host populations. The theoretical contribution is a Dynamic Environmental Infrastructure Systems framework that models the co-evolution of displaced population settlement patterns, environmental infrastructure systems, and ecological baseline conditions in North East Nigeria over a twenty-year transition horizon using system dynamics modelling. The framework integrates demographic projection, water supply infrastructure capacity modelling, soil erosion and land degradation dynamics, and epidemiological burden-of-disease functions into a coupled simulation model. The model is calibrated against observed data from Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa States and used to evaluate the environmental engineering investment priorities that minimise disease burden and ecological degradation over the transition horizon. Field data collection in eight displacement-affected communities provides both calibration data and qualitative validation of model structure through participatory systems mapping with community representatives. Original contributions include the dynamic environmental infrastructure systems framework and a comparative analysis of thirteen intervention portfolio scenarios evaluated against humanitarian, development, and ecological outcome metrics. Keywords: displacement, environmental engineering, humanitarian systems, North East Nigeria, dynamic modelling.