York University Symposium: From the Niger Delta, Nigeria to the World - Charting a Global Just Transition Agenda
On 10 April 2025, the International Working Group on Petroleum Pollution in the Niger Delta hosted a symposium entitled ‘From the Niger Delta, Nigeria to the World – Charting a Global Just Transition Agenda’ at York University, Toronto. The symposium brought together a diverse group of scholars, community leaders and activists, legal experts, and international advocates to examine the relationship between the prospects for a global just transition, the Niger Delta’s enduring environmental crisis, and extractive violence in resource-rich areas in North America and elsewhere.
Coming in the wake of the finalisation of Shell’s sale of its assets in the Niger Delta, a few pressing questions emerged as themes throughout the symposium: How do you keep Shell accountable for the damage they’ve done? Will divestment be more than a clever PR ploy for big oil and gas? How to ensure communities aren’t the one’s left to the bear the costs of decades of oil extraction in the Niger Delta?
The legacy of oil pollution and human rights abuses in the Niger Delta are devastating, with Shell even being accused of being complicit in the Nigerian state’s secret sentencing and killing of activists in the 1990s, says Environment and Urban Change Prof. Anna Zalik, IWG member and one of the organizers of the event.
“Arguably, attention to injustice in the region spurred corporate social responsibility as an industrial movement and was central to creating the environmental justice movement globally. This symposium is an opportunity to take a hard look at this legacy of corporate abuse, resistance, and what comes next,” says Zalik.
From the earliest days of colonization in Nigeria, the British identified the Niger Delta as economically useful for resource extraction, and, for the last 60 years, Shell has been involved in oil and gas extraction in the region.
Informed by the report put together by the Bayelsa State Oil and Environmental Commission, which declares Shell’s legacy in the region as an environmental genocide, the symposium examined the prospects for a global just transition.
“When the word divestment is used — Shell for example dumping toxic assets on so-called local companies and shirking their historic responsibility to clean up— what does it really mean? There are questions regarding the limitations of the whole idea of just transition,” says York PhD alum Isaac Asume Osuoka, one of the authors of the Bayelsa Report and IWG member.
Text adapted from York University materials, available here.