The world has witnessed tremendous growth in population since the end of the second world war. Closely associated with this growth is the tremendous increase in the consumption of God's bountiful natural resource endowments. The consumption of the greatest proportion of the world's  resources is concentrated in the developed industrialized countries.

The western industrialized countries huge appetite for consuming natural resources has resulted in the reduction of vast amount of natural resources not only in these countries but also in their former colonies and other countries of the third world drawn into the global economic vortex.  Closely associated with this consumption is environmental degradation which is invariably a corollary of the exploitation of these resources. Solid-minerals mining, oil exploitation, forest exploitation, and to some extent vast plantation agriculture has so much altered the environmental configuration of the different ecological zones in these countries that it has become necessary to monitor, assess and evaluate the impact of these activities on the natural environment the land and the flora and fauna in them, the soils and their chemical compositions, structure, aeration etc; the air, the waters and their biological and microbial organic components.      

Nigeria as a third world developing country has not been spared the problems and agonies of the degradation of the environment which results from oil and solid minerals mining and forest exploitation. Since tin and columbite were struck in the Jos Plateau areas before the second world war and oil in Niger Delta in 1956, the result of the impact of these mining activities has been the creation of serious problems for the natural environment in these areas. Oil exploration in the Niger Delta has created all kinds of problems to the extent that some Oil Spill which is estimated at about  796 (MB) in 1989 has resulted In among others, the following:

Gas flaring is estimated at between 79-95% of the less than 1% of the three trillion standard cubic meters of Gas with which Nigeria is endowed. The major adverse socio-economic and environmental effects of gas flaring include:

Creeks and water ways have become ecologically “dead”.  The environmental degradation wrought by oil exploration and attendant gas flaring is so enormous that it has generated local, and at times international protests.
Furthermore, as Nigeria's industrialization advances gradually, it is likely to have negative impact on the environment in terms of the effluents that are discharged into its waterways and the soil and the combustion contaminants discharged into the atmosphere. It is largely because of the perceived need to monitor, assess, measure and evaluate how these multifarious activities affect the Nigerian physical environment that, Hudson International Company Limited was incorporated in 1988 “to undertake and carry out scientific and technical research and to gather and furnish technical information and services generally”.