The Africa Green Economy and Sustainability Institute (AGESI) said Nigeria’s climate action efforts are facing significant setbacks due to weak legal frameworks, poor regulatory enforcement, and fragmented governance.
AGESI raised the concern on Wednesday during a high-level dialogue titled, “Financing the Future: De-risking Green Investments and Market-ready Innovations under NDC 3.0,” to commemorate the 2026 World Environment Day, according to a statement by the institute.
According to a policy dialogue report released by AGESI in partnership with the United Nations Information Centre, Nigeria’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC 3.0) action plan seems ambitious, but international development lenders, financial experts, and civil society organisations consider it unattractive.
The report noted that financiers now prioritise investment-ready projects with measurable outcomes, strong governance, and strong financing rather than political commitments and environmental aspirations alone.
It added that Nigeria’s NDC 3.0, which outlines commitment to climate action under the Paris Agreement at COP21 in 2015, was constrained by weak implementation structures and limited institutional readiness to attract large-scale climate finance.
The principal climate change and green growth officer at the African Development Bank (AfDB), Gerald Njume, said multinational institutions were willing to finance Nigeria’s climate action plan, but the government must lead implementation.
Mr Njume noted weaknesses in governance, stating that the National Council on Climate Change (NCCC), overseeing climate coordination, lacked the authority to enforce regulations across ministries.
The report said that Nigeria has been unable to meet the requirements of foreign investors, who want strong adherence to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) safeguards and measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems.
Experts at the dialogue acknowledged Nigeria’s past capacity-building efforts but said they were insufficient to attract climate funds and called for a transition from basic training programmes to compliance standards to access funds.
The report called for the urgent establishment of a national climate finance compliance framework, harmonised MRV systems, and a complete overhaul of academic and professional curricula to support climate risk pricing and investment readiness.
It warned that micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and youth innovators, identified as key drivers of NDC 3.0, had been excluded from climate finance due to a lack of preparedness and compliance systems.
A climate finance expert Amandla Uzorka-Jarrett said that while Nigerian banks were willing to finance green projects, market uncertainty remains a major constraint, as well as the absence of a unified national green taxonomy.
The report proposed a radical blueprint for the National Green Investment Facility (NGIF) as an institutional platform for capacity building, enforcement of ESG and MRV compliance mechanisms, and the transformation of innovation into bankable deals.
It also recommended that federal ministries and governments at all levels must align under a unified standard for Nigeria to attract long-term investment.
To address the challenges of fragmented systems and compliance, AGESI announced the deployment of the “FIPRE” framework—Function, Impact, Prosperity, Resilience, and Equity—to assess projects and ensure alignment with NDC goals.
“Designed as a holistic development appraisal operating system, FIPRE offers a unified scoring system and bankability checks to verify NDC alignment,” AGESI said.
