With an estimated 350 carbon projects operating across the country, Nigeria has asserted sovereign rights in the market but has yet to exercise them, a gap that leaves communities and the country with a wide long-term climate finance gap, ISAAC CHIBUIFE reports.
Climate Equity and Nigeria's Carbon Market
The recent World Environment Day came with the theme 'Climate Equity', the principle that stipulates that communities that are most exposed to climate risk should not also bear the cost of the market mechanisms designed to address it. In Nigeria, that principle runs directly into a market generating hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon credit revenue on Nigerian soil, much of it without sovereign authorisation, formal community benefit agreements or a public record of who approved what.
The Zimbabwe Precedent
Two articles published in June drew attention to the case of Zimbabwe, whose government completed every step Article 6 requires: issuing authorisations, routing credits through a national registry and applying the adjustments needed to prevent double-counting. Its credits were nonetheless ruled ineligible for the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA), the aviation sector's offsetting scheme, which does not currently recognise sovereign registry transfers on the same basis as credits held on approved private platforms. Carbon Pulse described the outcome as a 'disconnect between Paris Agreement and ICAO rules', while Quantum Commodity Intelligence put the price consequence at approximately $14 per tonne in lost compliance value. The debate has since widened. But Nigeria is now part of it.
Nigeria's First-Order Questions
For Nigeria, the Zimbabwe problem is a second-order concern. The first-order questions are more basic – which projects are operating on Nigerian soil? Who authorised them? And what are the community benefit arrangements? Nigeria signed its Carbon Market Framework in January 2026 and has an estimated 350 projects at various stages of development, according to reports. But neither communities nor investors can reliably answer those questions, because no public registry of authorisation status exists.
The Authorisation Gap
According to the Paris Agreement's Article 6 framework, a government must issue a letter of authorisation before credits generated within its borders can be sold internationally as sovereign-backed units. That letter is how the host country formally consents to a project, assigns it a portion of the national carbon budget and applies the corresponding adjustment required to prevent double-counting. Nigeria's National Council on Climate Change has begun issuing them, while the pipeline is long and institutional capacity remains limited, reports suggest. In the meantime, projects are generating and selling credits on private standards without sovereign authorisation — credits that trade at lower prices, carry no formal community benefit obligation under Nigerian law and generate no fiscal return to the state. Findings said the projects are running. But there are questions about who sanctioned them and on whose behalf they are running.
Gap Developers Alone Cannot Fill
The Zimbabwe case makes one thing clear – developers and host governments are not on opposing sides of this problem. Developers operating without letters of authorisation are not circumventing the state; they are merely working within the only functional structure available, while the sovereign pathway exists in law but not in practice. The cost of that gap hardening is well-documented: Kenya's Koko Networks, an eleven-year enterprise backed by a $180 million World Bank guarantee, went bankrupt when its letter of authorisation did not arrive in time. In that case, nobody won. Some analysts propose 'mirroring' (national registries that reflect credits formally resident on private platforms) as an interim fix. CORSIA's current rules are more permissive of that. But a registry that mirrors a private ledger is not a sovereign one and resolves none of the underlying misalignments.
Just Before Next ICAO Session
ICAO's 238th Council session opens on 17 June, and the question of whether CORSIA's rules should be amended to recognise sovereign registry transfers will be live. Two actions are available before then. First, Nigeria's government would need to formally ask the crediting programmes operating on its soil what conditions a Nigerian sovereign registry would need to meet for its credits to qualify for CORSIA labelling. The programmes have discretionary space within the current rules, and the question deserves an on-record answer. Second, the National Council on Climate Change would need to publish a registry of every carbon project operating in Nigeria: location, certifying standard, authorisation status and community benefit arrangements. Both Ghana and Kenya do this. And Nigeria's framework commits to it. What is missing is a delivery date.
Nigeria is the gateway to the African economy. It has the largest carbon project pipeline in West Africa and a policy framework that explicitly asserts sovereign rights over its climate assets. The debate about who controls those assets is now in the mainstream media and it is moving fast. What Nigeria does not yet have is the institutional follow-through to make those rights legible — to communities, to developers and to the reformers at ICAO who will decide on 17 June whether the rules that disadvantage sovereign compliance are worth changing.
