Abstract
Soil contamination resulting from industrial, mining, and urban activities continues to create enduring ecological and socio-economic difficulties, especially in areas grappling with high youth unemployment. Phytoremediation, the deployment of plants and their microbial partners to detoxify polluted soils present dual benefits: advancing ecological restoration while opening pathways for green employment, skills acquisition, and local economic renewal. This review synthesizes scholarship published between 2015 and 2025 that explores the interface of phytoremediation, youth livelihoods, and community wellbeing. It considers the biological processes underpinning phytoremediation, case examples where remediation projects generated local jobs, economic innovations such as phytomining and biomass valorization, and the institutional and policy environments that enable these outcomes. Evidence suggests that when phytoremediation initiatives are paired with vocational training, value-chain opportunities, and participatory engagement, they can generate stable income streams, build resilience, and improve environmental quality. Nonetheless, challenges remain among them protracted remediation timelines, limited scalability, insufficient financing, skill mismatches among youth, and regulatory bottlenecks. The paper identifies priority areas for future work, including participatory program design, frameworks for assessing socio-environmental impacts, business models that embed green remediation, and policy mechanisms that incentivize uptake. By aligning ecological clean-up with youth empowerment and local development, phytoremediation emerges not only as a tool for environmental recovery but also as a driver of sustainable livelihoods and community regeneration.
References
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