Lekki Conservation Centre: Lagos’ Green Oasis Battling the Pressures of Urban Expansion

In the heart of Lagos, one of Africa's most densely populated concrete-dominated megacities, lies a 78-hectare ecological sanctuary. This is the Lekki Conservation Centre, serving as a vital green lung against aggressive urban expansion. What I'm really proud of is the maintenance, because I think that in Nigeria, maintenance is very lacking in a lot of things. So I think we should try to maintain more things like this. Personally, I'm very happy to see this place because in a city, in a chaotic and big city like Lagos, things like that, places like this where you can see the truly nature, where the nature is pure and original, are very important to understand the country. Established in 1990 by the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, the site preserves coastal wetlands that once covered the region, but surrounding real estate expansion has altered the landscape. One of the major challenges is the engulfment by human activities. And if you look around all the residential areas, you hardly can have your buildings The audience around without some feeling. So at the moment we are having a pool of water gathering within the center which is of course causing damages to some of our facilities, even including the trees. To engage urban dwellers, the center built Africa's longest suspended canopy walkway, a 401-meter path elevated 22 meters high. It's designed in such a way that it will give you access into the four layers in the forest. The forest floor, the understory, the canopy and the emergent. The emergent is where you go above the forest cover. You're operating at the emergent layer. As African cities urbanize at unprecedented rates, this urban reserve offers a blueprint for how nature and megacities can coexist.