Examining Urbanization and the Increasing Challenge of Urban Flood Disaster Risk in Nigeria

Urbanization as one of the demographic features in the world comes with lots of challenges and associated risks, one of which is flood disaster risk, while flood disaster is starring most cities of the world in its face, flood disaster is not entirely the cause(s) of both human and material resources loss, but rather the levels of vulnerability and exposure of people, elements and environment to potential disaster. In Nigeria therefore a number of flood disaster events have been recorded and which were reviewed in this study. The paper made use of both secondary quantitative and qualitative data, to examine cities situations as regards flood disaster, also an extensive literature review on urbanization and flood disaster risk conceptual issues were carried out. The paper critically looked at the growing challenges and risks posed by flood disaster risk across the world with particular concentration on Nigeria scenarios between 1985 and 2016. The reviewed data revealed that, a huge numbers of lives have been lost, and also material properties worth billions of Naira have also been lost to flood disaster, hence, the identified huge gap in addressing flood disaster risk by concerned stakeholders is advance in this paper, while some coordinated efforts and concerted strategies to reduces the growing challenge of urban flooding in Nigeria were recommended, among which are the issue of policy formulation, designing of emergency strategy planning and spatial redevelopment in most of Nigeria cities, as measures to stem the tide or the growing trends of urban flood disaster in Nigerian cities.