West Africa's Coastal and Inland Regions

The Gulf of Guinea coastline of West Africa is fringed by dense mangrove forests and, at its heart, the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria — Africa's largest wetland and river delta, covering roughly 70,000 square kilometers of distributaries, mangrove swamp, and freshwater floodplain. The delta sits atop Nigeria's major oil and gas reserves, discovered in commercial quantities at Oloibiri in 1956, and Nigeria has since become Africa's largest oil producer for much of the past half-century, pumping on the order of 1.2 to 1.5 million barrels per day in the early 2020s even as chronic pipeline vandalism, oil theft, and spills have caused severe, well-documented environmental damage to the delta's mangroves and fisheries, a grievance that fueled the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) insurgency of the mid-2000s.