SOStainabilityWeekly
Edited by Oke Epia, E-mail: sostainability01@gmail.com | WhatsApp: +234 8034000706
Spotlight
SOStainability began this Green Ledger Series by spotlighting six federal government entities with clear mandates, direct and indirect responsibilities in Nigeria’s burgeoning carbon market ecosystem. These were the ministries of environment; industries, trade, and investments; the National Council on Climate Change (NCCC); the Financial Reporting Council (FRC); the Nigeria Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC); and the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA). We continue this part of the series with a focus on the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA).
The NSIA has done notable groundwork in building the architecture of Nigeria’s evolving carbon market. Even though the market is still mostly a conversation about potential rather than a market where money changes hands for verified tonnes of carbon avoided or removed, it is the job of entities like the NSIA to turn promise into reality. The authority was appointed to the intergovernmental committee set up to drive Nigeria’s Carbon Market Activation Plan. Furthermore, the NSIA sits in the One Planet Sovereign Wealth Fund Initiative, a club of global funds trying to bake climate risk into how they manage money.
The authority has also put its capital where its mouth is. Through Carbon Vista, a joint venture with global energy trader Vitol, NSIA invested an initial 50 million dollars in carbon avoidance and removal projects across infrastructure, agriculture and energy. The authority is also backing solar, battery storage and diesel-displacement projects; and has a guarantee company to make green investments less frightening for the private capital that still hesitates at Nigeria’s door.
These efforts have not gone unnoticed internationally. In 2025, NSIA was named Sovereign Wealth Fund of the Year at the Sustainable Investment Awards and posted a perfect score on the Global SWF Governance, Sustainability and Resilience Scoreboard, a rare bragging right. It has also been accredited as a Direct Access Entity of the Green Climate Fund, the world’s largest dedicated climate fund, which, in effect, means Nigeria now has a more direct pipe to global climate money, rather than having to go through someone else’s tap.
There is no doubt that the architecture for Nigeria’s carbon emissions trading is rapidly taking shape. Stakeholders are increasingly shifting focus to the actual benefits that spread through the value chain. Real value is when money moves from someone who wants to offset or reduce emissions to someone who is actually doing the reducing- for example, a farmer restoring degraded land, a company swapping diesel generators for solar, a community adopting clean cookstoves instead of firewood. This is where the opportunity really kicks in. And the numbers make the scale of the opportunity hard to ignore. The federal government’s Carbon Market Activation Policy estimates the country could generate between roughly 87 and 125 million tonnes of greenhouse gas reductions through carbon market activities, with a cumulative market value of up to 2.5 billion dollars by 2030. More recent government projections, made ahead of Nigeria’s carbon market framework approval before COP30 in Belém, have pushed that ambition further, to as much as 3 billion dollars a year in carbon finance inflows over the next decade. Independent analysis from a Columbia University capstone project done in partnership with NSIA put annual carbon credit potential at 8 to 18 million tonnes across forestry, agriculture and clean cooking alone, sectors where ordinary Nigerians, not just corporations, stand to earn.
For an economy still leaning heavily on fossil fuels and needing over 410 billion dollars by 2060 to fund its Energy Transition Plan, this is not a side hustle. It is a genuine new export, except what’s being exported is verified restraint: the carbon we did not emit, the forest we did not fell. But potential is not revenue. A market only becomes “investable” when three unglamorous things exist: a credible registry that buyers trust, a pricing mechanism that doesn’t leave sellers guessing, and a pipeline of bankable projects large enough to interest serious capital, not just goodwill. This is exactly where an institution like NSIA, with its big balance sheet, guarantee vehicle, and seat at the policy table, has a chance to do something few others can: help turn a framework into a functioning marketplace.
This is where the Green Ledger Series weighs in with the hard questions. What next after the policies and frameworks are put in place? How many carbon credit projects, concretely, have been financed or co-financed since Carbon Vista was established, and in which Nigerian states? Of the 600,000 to 2.3 million green jobs the government has promised the carbon market will create, how many actually exist today, and who is counting them? What proportion of the projected 2.5 to 3 billion dollars in annual carbon finance potential has actually been converted and contracted? What happens to the ordinary farmer or forest community who generates a credit but has no idea how to sell it, verify it, or get paid for it? To be clear, these are not questions for the NSIA alone. Many other actors, including the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Nigerian Exchange, have roles to play. Development finance institutions, diaspora investors, and Nigeria’s own thriving fintech and agritech ecosystems belong in this conversation too. This is because the smallholder farmer restoring degraded land in Kebbi or the clean cookstove entrepreneur in Kano will not be reached by a Lagos boardroom memo. They will be reached by the local aggregators, cooperatives and digital platforms that can translate “carbon credit” into money they can actually see in their bank accounts.
Nigeria has written an ambitious, technically sound blueprint for its carbon market. The world is watching, Africa is watching, and over 200 million Nigerians are, whether they know it or not, sitting on convertible assets: their forests, their farmlands, their clean air commitments that could finally start paying them back.
