Abstract

Deforestation is a key problem for many countries including Nigeria. About 3500 to 4000 square Kilometre of the Nigeria’s land is lost to deforestation each year which calls for an urgent attention. An earlier study used a stochastic model known as the Interval Transition probability of a Semi-Markov Process to study the long-run effect of deforestation on Nigeria’s total land area with the results: Nigeria will loss 0.042, 0.272, 0.383, 0.408, and 0.409% of her total land area in the 20th, 200th, 500th, 1000th and 1120th years, respectively beginning from 2017. The limitation of this study is that in computing the model parameters, a history of data for land lost due to deforestation in Nigeria is needed which is not readily available. Hence, the motivation for this research. In this study, a modified exponential distribution is proposed to study the long run effect of deforestation on the Nigeria’s total land area that does not depend on the history of data but on the current information. The result indicates that 7.783, 55.525, 86.809, 98.260 and 98.930% of the Nigeria’s land will be lost to deforestation in the 20th, 200th, 500th, 1000th and 1120th, respectively from 2017. Agreeing with the result of the earlier study is that, if nothing is done to stop or control deforestation, Nigeria will loss almost her entire land area in about 1120 years from 2017. The modified exponential distribution is recommended since its prediction depends on the current information and not on the history.