In places like Bille, which the BBC visited last week, residents describe once-rich fishing grounds turning toxic and unusable.
“Before 2011, here was a beautiful area. People play here and go into the river,” 64-year-old fisherman Balafama Augustus Bruce told the BBC.
Bruce, a claimant in the case against Shell, said before all the spills he was able to catch a variety of fish including sardines, catfish, tilapia and even oysters – but most are now hard to find or, if caught, appear deformed.
“We used to fish around here. But because of the damage [the spills] have caused, nobody is fishing here again.
“Because of that I’ve become poor. I eat from hand to mouth.”
The communities via the ongoing international lawsuit against Shell are seeking $1bn (£742m), including:
According to the UN, since 1958 when Shell sent its first shipment of oil from Nigeria, at least 13 million barrels – or 1.5 million tonnes – of crude oil have been spilled in at least 7,000 incidents.
Campaigners have long tried to hold multinational oil firms accountable for environmental damage there – a vocal critic of Shell was Ken Saro-Wiwa, one of Nigeria’s leading writers, who was notoriously executed by the then-military government in 1995 after leading demonstrations against the pollution in his Ogoniland region of the Niger Delta.
Oil theft has also long been a problem in the Niger Delta – known as “bunkering” it usually involves criminal gangs tapping into pipelines and siphoning off crude into boats or storage tanks. Some of the stolen oil is refined in makeshift camps hidden in the creeks, while the rest is sold off illegally.
In the mid-2000s oil militancy was also a major security issue as heavily armed militants on speedboats attacked installations and kidnapped foreign workers for ransom, including a series of incidents in 2007 and 2008, as part of their demands that the impoverished region receive more benefits from oil revenues.