Assessment of Green Building Practices among Built Environment Professionals in Nigeria: A Systematic Review of the Awareness-Practice Gap

Green building has moved from a niche environmental concern to a mainstream expectation in construction industries worldwide, yet its uptake across Nigeria's built environment professions remains poorly understood as a connected whole. This systematic review asks what Nigerian architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, builders, and estate surveyors actually know and do about green building, and why the two so often diverge. Following a structured search and screening process informed by PRISMA principles, seventy-one studies conducted in Nigeria between 2011-2026 were retained for thematic synthesis. The evidence shows that awareness of green building concepts is now moderate to high among Nigerian professionals, yet practical implementation lags well behind, a pattern this review terms the awareness-practice gap. The clearest single measure of this gap comes from a six-zone national survey in which 47.3% of professionals showed high awareness of sustainable construction materials, but only 11.4% showed correspondingly high adoption, a difference of almost 36% points, and at least ten further studies in this review's corpus report a similar pattern using different methods and samples. Five barrier clusters recur across the literature: the perception that green building costs more, weak regulatory enforcement, scarce locally available green materials, limited technical training, and the absence of a nationally recognised rating system. Awareness and adoption both vary by profession, firm characteristics, and region, with architects and quantity surveyors generally better informed than builders, and the evidence base itself heavily concentrated in Lagos and the South-West. Government policy support, client demand, and applied continuing professional development emerge as the most consistently cited levers for closing the gap. This review concludes that further progress in Nigeria depends less on convincing professionals that green building matters, since most already accept that it does, and more on removing the structural, financial, and institutional obstacles that currently keep knowledge from becoming practice.

Green Building, Sustainable Construction, Built Environment Professionals

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