When you picture cutting emissions, it’s likely you picture combustion: power plants, car exhaust, a smokestack burning something. But a share of any industrial economy’s greenhouse gases never passes through a flame at all. For example, turning limestone into clinker releases carbon dioxide as a matter of chemistry, not as a fuel byproduct. Making steel, manufacturing chemicals, and running refrigerants in air conditioners and cold storage all emit greenhouse gases by the nature of the process itself.
These emissions come from the industrial sector, or in the language of climate accounting, industrial processes and product use (IPPU). They’re among the most challenging emissions for a country to measure, as the data tends to be scattered across private factories, is often commercially sensitive, and rarely arrives in a tidy national format. For a fast-industrializing country like Nigeria, this is a real challenge—it’s not easy to keep a climate promise about emissions you can’t yet see.
That’s the gap a recently completed project set out to close in Nigeria, led by the country’s National Council on Climate Change (NCCC) and a team of national consultants, with GHGMI and Citepa as technical leads and funding from the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency (ICAT).
An Industrial Success Story, and its Shadow
Nigeria has spent two decades deliberately growing what it makes at home. A policy adopted in 2002 tied import licenses to building local factories, and the effect was dramatic: a wave of domestic heavy industry, cement and steel above all but also fertilizers, that reduced the country’s reliance on imports and created jobs.
Though it’s an economic achievement, it also has a “climate shadow.” As heavy manufacturing expanded, so did the emissions that come with it, particularly the process emissions that make the IPPU sector so significant and quite tricky to track. The very industries a developing economy wants to build are the ones whose emissions are hardest to account for, and for years, IPPU wasn’t a top priority in Nigeria’s reporting.
What it Takes to Count it
The project team worked through the IPPU sector piece by piece, identifying who holds the data, assessing its reliability and completeness, and mapping how information would flow from individual producers up to a national inventory. From that groundwork came a set of “rules” about who is responsible for what, also known as institutional arrangements. This helps the country maintain a consistent data collection process, rather than reconstructing it from scratch each reporting cycle.
Most importantly, the IPPU sector wasn’t treated in isolation. The project folded it into the overarching national MRV system Nigeria had begun building in an earlier phase of the work. The point of that integration is simple but important because countries must report a complete GHG inventory (by sector) under the Paris Agreement.
“Industrial process emissions are some of the most difficult to capture, because the information lives with many different producers and rarely arrives in the same form twice,” said Julien Vincent, the project’s technical lead at Citepa. “The real work isn’t only measuring them once. It was building a way for that data to move, reliably, into the national inventory every year. To track mitigation efforts in the IPPU sector, you must collect “real data” on raw materials used at the facility level, on a regular basis. This is the only way.”
Why an Economy-wide Pledge Raises the Stakes
The project’s timing isn’t a coincidence. In September 2025, Nigeria submitted its strengthened climate pledge, its NDC 3.0, and it marked a real shift. Where earlier pledges expressed a percentage cut against a business-as-usual projection, the new one commits to economy-wide, absolute reductions against a 2018 baseline, cutting emissions 29% by 2030 and 32% by 2035 on a path to net-zero by 2060.
Nigeria’s new pledge widened the range of emission sources it formally counts, reaching into the industrial and product-use activities that were hardest to measure. To credibly promise absolute cuts across the whole economy while a meaningful slice of your industrial emissions remains unmeasured isn’t really possible. The target and the tracking system must move together.
Handing it Over
All of this came to a head at a two-day closing workshop in Abuja on July 1 and 2, 2026, where the NCCC gathered ministries, industry bodies, civil society, youth representatives, and journalists to review and validate the project’s work.
A close-out workshop is a particular kind of milestone. It’s almost like a handover—the moment technical products stop belonging to a project and become the country’s own. Alongside the industrial-sector work, Nigeria now has additional guidelines for tracking and reporting its NDC. The aim, stated plainly throughout the event, was to make sure the tools outlast the project that built them.
“What matters most isn’t the documents we’ve produced; it’s that they now belong to Nigeria,” said Matej Gasperic, GHGMI’s Mitigation Director. “The NCCC and the national experts are the ones who will keep this system running long after our part is done. That was the goal from the very beginning.”
That emphasis on permanence is the quiet thread running through the whole effort. A sector brought into the count once, by outside help, can slip back out. A sector built into a country’s own institutions, with clear owners and routines, tends to stay visible.
Nigeria will still grow its industry—a deliberate and reasonable ambition for an economy of its size. The task was never to halt that growth but to see it clearly, because counting the emissions from making things is how a country that intends to keep industrializing can also keep a credible climate promise. What you can measure, you can manage. And Nigeria can now measure considerably more of itself than it could before.
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