Nigeria’s climate ambition is increasingly digital, but its data infrastructure is falling behind. Recently, the Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Emomotimi Agama, identified a major challenge confronting the market: many listed companies still lack coherent, structured, and verifiable sustainability disclosures.
Beyond the private sector, Nigeria’s public data systems do not communicate with one another. Different ministries, departments, and agencies often collect overlapping datasets independently, with limited interoperability, coordination, or data-sharing. Studies have shown that sharing data between government agencies reduces the high costs associated with multiple data capturing for similar services.
Companies may report sustainability information, but regulators cannot easily aggregate, verify, or operationalise the data for national climate governance.
Presently, companies disclose sustainability data through regulatory channels such as the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria and the Nigerian Exchange Limited. FRC sustainability disclosures are not linked to the National GHG Registry, and NGX Environmental, Social, and Governance reporting systems are not connected to carbon credit Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification systems.
At the same time, national emissions are tracked through separate government processes. Most climate disclosures are still published in PDFs rather than machine-readable formats such as XBRL, which makes climate data standardised, comparable, and usable at scale for decision-making.
Investors are increasingly drawn to countries that can demonstrate high-integrity emissions data through MRV systems. However, where data is fragmented, investors often stay away.
Without integrated data systems, carbon budgets cannot be tracked in real time, and emissions reductions cannot be easily verified. Most importantly, this weakens confidence in carbon credits, which are increasingly positioned as a major financing opportunity. As a result, Nigeria’s carbon market is struggling to gain investor trust. While the country has the policy architecture to participate in global carbon markets, it still lacks the data infrastructure needed to compete effectively within them. The current Minister of State reiterated this concern for Industry, John Enoh, who noted that unreliable ESG data remains a major gap affecting investment and policy decisions in Nigeria.
The question is: how can Nigeria operationalise and coordinate the climate data system? And how can this connect corporate disclosures with national emissions accounting through standardised formats and digital integration? Nigeria needs to build interoperability between reporting platforms and national registries, supported by regulatory guidance, such as the National Council on Climate Change.
The system would transform climate governance from a reporting mechanism into a verification mechanism. It would allow regulators to track emissions against sectoral targets, provide baselines for carbon credit issuance, and give investors confidence.
With this system, the NCCC can evolve from a coordinating body into the central authority for climate data integrity.
Nigeria needs more than $400bn in additional investment to finance its energy transition by 2060. This scale of climate finance is increasingly tied to measurable outcomes, meaning that countries with credible data systems are better positioned to attract capital at scale.
With the Climate Change Act and the establishment of the NCCC, Nigeria has laid a foundation for climate governance. It has the policy direction and institutional structure. The next step is to make climate data usable, connected, and verifiable.
Femi Oluwafemi is an environmental, social, and governance and sustainability professional
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