Paper as a consumer product offers a undisputed benefits to human society, and it has been proven to be critical in driving most sensitive needs of mankind—principally in areas of security, education, sanitation, and communication—and thus has been produced and consumed worldwide. Its sustainable production and usage is one topic that has featured prominently in many discussion fronts and more often than not ends with recommendations for an alternative source of raw material, improvement in production procedures, and ecological concerns. Paper use is an ecological concern that has triggered many paper intervention actions around the world such as the Paper Task Force in USA, Sustainable Paper Alliance in China, and Paper and Beyond in Europe. In Nigeria, however, challenges associated with paper production, consumption, and economic prospects have not been adequately tackled. This is conspicuously evident in the huge volume of paper products imported annually into the country as a result of unsustainable local production. The cumulative impact of these issues reflect negatively on the Nigeria’s paper industry and spread indirectly to the entire country’s economy in terms of high capital freight spent on importation, volatile product price, and loss of employment opportunities. This work sought to review the challenges and opportunities associated with raw material sources, energy and water consumption, environmental pollution, paper consumption, and disposal of used paper products in Nigeria. The current review also advocated for wastepaper as a variant of raw material with a sustainable potential.

There are generally no acceptable views on the conservation of biodiversity because there are no known best approaches to that. This has presented a challenge on what and how to conserve in developing countries like Nigeria. This paper used a multi-criteria decision-making model based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to elicit experts’ opinions on biodiversity conservation approaches and their corresponding conservation targets. The rationality of the experts was checked by measuring their consistency in the decision-making process. A greedy search algorithm based on linear programming application was also used for resource allocation. This technique is holistic and allows the decision maker to consider all pertinent factors. The approach allows policy makers to integrate worldviews; culture; diverse flexibility of concerned communities and other stakeholders in identifying conservation practices to achieve sustainability. In terms of current performance for the biodiversity conservation approaches; the conservation experts rated their performance on Ecosystem-service-based approach high with the priority index of 0.460. Their performances on Area- and Species-based approaches are ranked second and third with priority indexes of 0.288 and 0.252 respectively. Conversely; in the case of expectations; Ecosystem service is the most important with a priority index of 0.438 followed by Area-based with a priority index of 0.353 and Species–based with a priority index of 0.209. The Ecosystem-service based approach has the highest contribution coefficient. Resources are allocated accordingly; in form of capacity building; based on the priorities that were obtained. The research is a rights-based tool for capacity building; and a paradigm shift from the purely scientific approach to decision-making. It is designed to bridge a scientific gap between policy formulation and resource allocation in biodiversity conservation.