Recent explosions in demography and urbanization have prompted concerns for investigating the various dimensions of
human environment. Of particular interest are the land use/land cover (LU/LC) themes, which have been undergoing severe modifications,
due to the range of human activities. The problem with such changes, if not checked, is that the land surfaces will become vulnerable to
environmental threats of all kinds, and human populations will be at the receiving end of incidental difficulties. This paper presents the
result of LU/LC investigation and mapping of the metropolitan areas of Lagos, Nigeria, using 2012 SLC-off Landsat ETM+ images. While
unsupervised maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) was adopted for the investigation, the gaps in the SLC-off images were filled by means
of a simple heuristic approach that applies the inverse distance weighting (IDW) interpolation algorithm, available in QGIS software. The
result obtained tends to show that more than half of the land areas of the Lagos metropolis have been urbanized, and this change is
occurring at an alarming proportion. This rapid urban explosion can be attributed to the influx of large numbers of the human
populations, who have migrated from different parts of Nigeria, and the establishment of more housing units to accommodate them. The
evidence of such urban growth is often perceived in the reclamation of land from water body, and the despoliation of vegetative networks,
which help maintain the balance of the ecosystem. Ultimately, such adjustments compound the impacts of climate change and intensify the
frequency and severity of environmental disasters, such as flooding and drought, on human populations.