"My Coconuts are polluted on the inside" one Niger Delta farmer told SDN's researchers in 2006. The land is scarred by the oil industry. Burning wounds - gas flares - belch fire and noxious fumes into the sky 24 hours a day. Poisonous black gold is continuously spilt over the rich, fertile land, affecting every living organism.

The farmland, rivers and natural environment of the Niger Delta are a rich, locally-owned resource which - like the Delta's people - will be around long after the oil wells run dry.

If nutured properly over the next decade, the Delta's rich environment - and not just its vast oil and gas reserves - could be the key to a sustainable economic future.

Decades of pollution has left a scar the minds of the population and not juts on the environment in the Niger Delta. The daily reminder that their plight has been forgotten in symbolised by the burning flares, towering over many communities.

The impact of this environmental devastation has not only been to reduce the agricultural yields of the Niger Delta both directly and indirectly, but also to increase the local demands for compensation. This self replicating negative cycle significantly reduces the local management and use of the local environment assets in order to further their own.

There is huge potential to turn the locally flared associated gas (AG) and gas pockets into a local energy supply that would not only create jobs in the region but significantly reduce the impacts of local deforestation.

In the short term the perceived environmental devastation of the Niger Delta will not be overcome. An independent, international Health and Environmental Impact Assessment, would go some way in convincing local populations that their plight is no longer forgotten.

Additionally, diversification of the Delta away from a dependency on foreign earnings generated from energy production, into agriculture and fisheries - what investment policy wonks are increasingly calling "local content" generation (the stable, sane and prosperous society the world needs around energy reserves to make them "secure") - would ensure that the benefits of the brief Petroleum Age can be enjoyed by generations to come.