Nigeria News Brief and Action Alert

Nigeria: Current Emission Levels

September 17, 2026September 17, 2026

The single biggest obstacle to deeper cuts is structural: Nigeria’s economy runs on oil and gas.

In 2022, Nigeria emitted 554.1 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the figure has been climbing for years. In 2020, it was 520.4 million tonnes. In 2021, it rose to 532.6 million tonnes. By 2022, it had reached 554.1 million tonnes, or 554,095 kilotonnes of CO2 equivalent, the most recent year for which the government has published figures. That’s after subtracting what the country’s forests and land absorb. Before that subtraction, the raw total for 2022 is even higher, at 678,270 kilotonnes.

This data comes from Nigeria’s First Biennial Transparency Report, a document the government submitted to the United Nations in December 2024. It’s the most authoritative source on the subject, which is why it anchors most of what follows.

A Number That Quietly Doubled

Here’s where the story gets complicated. Back in 2021, when Nigeria updated its climate pledge, it told the UN that its 2018 emissions stood at 347,000 kilotonnes. That figure became the baseline for the country’s entire climate commitment, the benchmark against which every future measurement would be judged.

Then, in the 2024 transparency report, Nigeria went back and recalculated that same year. The new number for 2018 came out to 614,172 kilotonnes, nearly double the original estimate. Officials say this isn’t because pollution actually doubled overnight. It’s because the government improved its data collection and accounting methods the second time around, which is fairly normal for national climate reports as science and monitoring improve.

But the revision matters enormously for how Nigeria’s progress looks on paper. Measured against the original, lower 2018 figure of 347,000 kilotonnes, Nigeria’s 2022 emissions are up by roughly 60%. Measured against the newer, recalculated figure of 614,172 kilotonnes, the same 2022 emissions represent a 10% reduction. Same country, same year, same underlying data, yet two very different conclusions, depending entirely on which baseline is used.

Climate Action Tracker, an independent group that audits national climate pledges, isn’t fully convinced by the more flattering version. It has cautioned that the apparent 10% drop is mostly a bookkeeping effect rather than real-world progress, and that if emissions are compared consistently year over year, Nigeria’s pollution has actually grown in nearly every year since it joined the Paris Agreement in 2017.

Where All That Carbon Comes From

Looking across the full stretch of data from 2000 to 2022, one sector stands well above the rest as Nigeria’s biggest source of emissions: land use, land-use change, and forestry, driven mainly by deforestation and by people cutting wood for fuel and charcoal. Energy comes next, followed by agriculture, then waste, and finally industrial processes and product use, which is consistently the smallest of the five.

A commonly cited snapshot from 2018 breaks the picture down further. That year, energy alone accounted for roughly 60% of total emissions, and within that figure, about 22% came just from oil and gas operations consisting of leaks, flaring, and venting. Agriculture, forestry, and other land use combined made up another 25% or so. Industrial processes and waste, taken together, accounted for the remaining 15%.

Broken down by gas type rather than by sector, carbon dioxide makes up about 70% of Nigeria’s total emissions over the 2000-to-2022 period, methane accounts for roughly 25%, and nitrous oxide makes up the small remainder.

Industrial processes and product use may be the smallest-emitting sector, but it’s also the fastest-growing one by a wide margin, with emissions increasing by upwards of 947% between 2000 and 2022. While that may sound dramatic, it started from a very small base; as a result, even after growing nearly tenfold, it still is not a major slice of the national total.

The 50% Target That Doesn’t Exist

You may have heard it said that Nigeria promised to cut its emissions in half from 2020 levels by 2030. That claim doesn’t match what Nigeria actually pledged. The country’s real, binding commitment is a 20% cut it will make unconditionally, rising to a 47% cut if it receives sufficient international financing. Either way, that reduction is measured against a projected “business-as-usual” scenario for 2030, using 2018 as the reference point, rather than against 2020’s actual emissions.

Even measured against that more modest goal, Nigeria isn’t on pace to meet it. Climate Action Tracker projects that under current policies, and excluding land-use effects, emissions will run 62 to 72% above 2010 levels by 2030. Nigeria’s own transparency report reaches a similar conclusion, projecting that net emissions will climb to about 778,387 kilotonnes by 2030, well above the 2020 total of 520,395 kilotonnes rather than below it. Renewable energy, meant to be a central pillar of the mitigation plan, has lagged especially badly: only about 21 megawatts of new renewable capacity was added between 2015 and 2022, against a 2030 target of more than 23,000 megawatts, or over 23 gigawatts.

The Net-Zero Date Is 2060, Not 2050

Another common misconception is that Nigeria has promised carbon neutrality by 2050. It hasn’t. The actual pledge, announced by then-President Muhammadu Buhari at the COP26 summit in 2021 and reaffirmed in Nigeria’s 2023 Long-Term Low-Emissions Development Strategy and again in its 2025 NDC 3.0 submission, targets net zero by 2060, a full decade later.

Nigeria isn’t clearly on track for that date either. The transparency report’s own projections show national emissions continuing to climb well into the future, reaching roughly 998,799 kilotonnes by 2035 and 1,274,472 kilotonnes by 2040, more than double the 2022 level. Climate Action Tracker rates Nigeria’s overall climate governance and implementation as weak, noting that the long-term strategy leans heavily on actions scheduled for after 2030, with little near-term detail to back it up. The group describes the rollout of renewable energy as “barely moving”. It points out that the carbon tax and emissions trading system required under Nigeria’s 2021 Climate Change Act still hasn’t been implemented.

Why Nigeria Can’t Just Cut Emissions Faster

The single biggest obstacle to deeper cuts is structural: Nigeria’s economy runs on oil and gas. The petroleum sector has accounted for more than 60% of government revenue in recent years, roughly 10% of GDP, and over 80% of export earnings. That level of dependence makes it politically and financially difficult to scale back fossil fuel production, whatever the climate targets say on paper.

Other pressures compound the problem. Gas flaring and fugitive methane leaks continue largely unchecked despite a 2023 Methane Guidelines policy and a stated goal of ending routine flaring by 2030. Unreliable electricity access, meanwhile, pushes households and businesses toward diesel generators and firewood, which feeds the deforestation that is already Nigeria’s single largest source of gross emissions. Renewable energy rollout, as already noted, remains slow.

There’s an institutional gap as well. The National Council on Climate Change, the agency created under the 2021 Climate Change Act to steer the country’s climate policy, is, in the transparency report’s own words, “still not fully operational.” The carbon tax and emissions trading system that the same law requires still don’t exist.

And finally, there’s the cost. Nigeria estimates it needs roughly $177 billion between 2021 and 2030 to deliver on its conditional emissions target fully; financing that, so far, hasn’t materialized anywhere near that scale.

This Post was submitted by Climate Scorecard Nigeria Country Manager Michael Johnson.

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