A fisherman on Nigeria's Cross River or in Bayelsa when asked on climate change and its diplomacy will tell you that climate diplomacy is a very far-fetched language until the tide climbs a little higher into his compound each year. He does not discuss markets or mitigation, he discusses roofs, nets, and school fees, things that he can see and feel their impacts around him. However, now his destiny is being completely woven into a kind of global experiment: Nigeria is pushing very hard to transform tons and tons of avoided emissions into cash flows, to sell verified climate benefits to foreign markets and also to be able to provide clean cooking, forest protection, as well as more jobs at home. These are what are referred to as carbon credits, official certificates that represent one ton of carbon dioxide that was prevented from entering the atmosphere. Companies or countries can buy and sell them in order to be able to meet or achieve their climate targets. It is a license/permit that allows companies in foreign countries to pay in order to emit a ton of carbon dioxide, provided the same quantity is reduced or taken up elsewhere.In simple words, they are vouchers of good actions, each one proving that a ton of carbon dioxide was prevented from entering the air, and allowing someone elsewhere to emit that same amount. Carbon credits are meant to make pollution pay its way and are now fast becoming the new currency of climate diplomacy. That is the promise and the peril that Nigeria wants to gamble on.

Looking at this situation. We can say that the bet is sweeping very well in ambition. Abuja has moved from rhetoric to scaffolding, building rules as well as various institutions to try to catch that very important wave of climate finance. The Climate Change Act (2021) helped to create a very essential body, the National Council on Climate Change (NCCC) and also a system of five-year carbon budgets,  incorporating  climate policy into the machinery and fabric of federal decision-making.  In 2024-25, the government advanced a Carbon Market Activation Plan/Policy, signaling its very strong intent to stand up a national registry, match it up with the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market’s Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) (principles for identifying high-quality carbon credits that create real, verifiable climate impact), coupled also with positioning the country for more and more green investment,  with official statements and trade media pegging this great opportunity around the whooping sum of $2.5 billion by 2030.  Most recently, the presidency sanctioned a national carbon market framework and proceeded to operationalize a climate fund, and returned the NCCC to the annual budget, an administrative indication that the initiative is not a back burner but state policy. International commitment to Nigeria is also unchanged: reduce emissions by 20% below business-as-usual by 2030 unconditionally (45% with support), targets which are judged to be broadly consistent with a 1.5C pathway to the unconditional slice.

However, carbon markets are no magic but contracts founded on trust. Should Nigeria be putting a chip on this table, it is doing so against a backdrop of a raging debate in the world regarding quality and integrity. Clean-cooking projects that are central to African credit supply have delivered health as well as various time-saving benefits, but they have also faced robust scrutiny.  A 2024 Nature Sustainability study reported that some cookstove credits were over-credited on average by roughly 9 times, prompting reforms by standards bodies; both Verra and Gold Standard have since tightened methodologies, with Verra issuing further corrections to its new VM0050 approach in 2025. 

Nigeria is trying hard as well to read that mood. The proposed Carbon Market Activation Policy , mentions explicitly transitioning to CCP-compatible characteristics and a national roadmap to 2030, and national regulators are clamping the screws to the fossil sector. From January 2025, upstream oil as well as gas applicants must show low-carbon operations, methane management, and renewable integration as part of licensing, a small but telling step that links legacy energy to a net-zero destination. When such domestic filters can increase the baseline integrity, carbon projects, be they cookstoves, nature-based, or methane abatement, can be put on a stronger credibility platform.

But this is where the concept of the two-level game becomes very interesting. As taught by Robert Putnam, Climate bargains are made at Level I (international negotiations) and ratified in Level II domestic politics . Diplomats of Nigeria may promise high-integrity credits to the world, but the nation’s governors, regulators, local chiefs, women groups and developers must discover something of worth or the deal will fail in practice. And for a federation like Nigeria's, that domestic win-set is complicated.  Let's take a deep look at the issue, oil-producing states want transition pathways that do not reduce jobs, forest communities demand a say in all the REDD+ designs and revenue-sharing, federal agencies must coordinate registries and avoid double-counting, while at the other end project developers need highly predictable and bankable rules. At the global level, consumers will demand CCP-labeled credits, strong community protection, and transparency about relevant adjustments. The intersection of the two levels represents the space of a very viable carbon-market frontier of Nigeria.

To see the opportunity, we can separate this into three live strands. First, clean cooking. In 2025, New Nigerian cookstove initiatives have been announced to bring together hundreds of thousands of stoves to rural families in states like Niger and Nasarawa, in addition to a very bold vision of reaching 500,000 credits per year when they become fully implemented. Such projects would be able to deliver health benefits to women, decrease the pressure of deforestation, and produce verifiable credits that satisfy the integrity standards of buyers, should they be measured using conservative baselines and digital usage monitoring. The African context in general is not insignificant: the carbon revenues in clean-cooking multiplied fourfold between 2020 and 2024 to 107 million, which indicates that there is actual demand when quality is credible.

Second, forests. Cross River State, which contains about half of the remaining forests in Nigeria, has over ten years been working on a sub-national REDD+ pathway in order to establish reference levels, safeguards, and a nested model to draw the results-based payments.  But scholarly as well as practitioner work also cautions that genuine community participation and benefit-sharing are very decisive when it comes to issues of legitimacy.

Third, methane and industry. The new upstream decarbonization template brings Nigeria inches closer to the low-cost, fast-acting near-term cooling tool, thus reducing or even completely wiping out methane leaks and flaring in oil and gas. Combining licensing reforms with pilot trades or high-integrity voluntary credits might help a lot in trying to transform the emissions reduction into cash, as long as the MRV is highly stringent and the adjustment logic is also very transparent so as to prevent double-claiming.

Despite all this, a gamble is still a gamble. The upsides looks very real and promising, because for a country like that is trying to manage inflation, with wide infrastructure gaps, as well as energy poverty, all encompassed into one, a credible credit pipeline could channel concessional-like flows into clean cooking, rural energy, forest protection, coupled with methane cuts with co-benefits for health and security as well. The downside is also equally very clear, credits that are low quality would damage the image of Nigeria, halt projects, and cause a domestic backlash in case communities feel cheated. The recent scandals in the global voluntary market are warning stories, not dismissals. They underline what is most imperative, measure honestly, verify independently, and the most important of all, share benefits fairly.

With all of these taken into consideration, what then, would it take for Nigeria’s bet to pay off both in the conference room as well as by the riverside?

A four point strategy;

To start with, consider integrity as an export standard. Imprint the CCP yardstick and conservative baselines  into the Nigerian rules especially through acts of parliament at the National Assembly and ensure that they are implemented accordingly.  After that, there should be a requirement for digital monitoring for cookstoves,  and also match REDD+ with nested accounting and grievance systems people can rely on, and publish project data on just a single and interoperable registry so as to prevent issues of double counting from springing up.

Second, bring the Level II coalition to life, and the most efficient means of doing this most advantageously is to achieve buy-in among governors, traditional institutions, with women and civil-society monitors in the form of benefit-sharing formula and legally binding community agreements which are very transparent. At the moment the windfall comes, it should be possible to see new clinics, boreholes, and livelihood change rather than Excel dashboards and billboards displaying progress.

Third, associate carbon with development priorities through the use of climate-fund windows and MDB guarantees to de-risk early projects, project oil-and-gas licensing on the basis of methane performance (already in place) and directing some of the proceeds into clean cooking on a very large scale as well as higher salaries for forest rangers.

Lastly and the most critical of them, pursue strategic climate diplomacy. At the UNFCCC and in Article 6 clubs, the voice of high-integrity credits that would make contributions to global objectives without depriving the developing countries of development space. The aim here is not to sell absolution;  but instead to sell proven mitigation, resilience and to use the proceeds in order to accelerate and also deepen domestic transitions.

Therefore, in case diplomacy is the art of the possible, the carbon-credit push in Nigeria is the art of the credible. The fisherman on the Cross River will not read or understand the Core Carbon Principles, but he will know whether the new cookstove is, in fact, saving fuel, whether the forest patrols are preventing illegal logging, and whether the floods will spare the clinic due to the rebuilding of a culvert, etc. That is the union with Level I promise and Level II delivery and that is what makes a gamble a strategy. The challenge before Nigeria now is to put the size of the requirements in proportion to the integrity of its offers, and to turn global requirements of credibility into local returns of honor. Do that, and the market will not be like a bet at all but instead it will feel more like a very mutual cooperation that is paying off both at home in the country and abroad.