The Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN), in collaboration with the National Council on Climate Change (NCCC), has initiated the process of implementing Monitoring Reporting Verification (MRV) systems to mitigate emissions in Nigeria.
Director general, NCCC, Dr Nkiruka Maduekwe, spoke at an Inception Workshop to Implement MRV for Short-lived Climate Pollutants (SLCPs) in Key Sectors on Tuesday in Abuja.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), reports that MRV programmes help governments to better understand how various sectors contribute to methane and other emissions and identify the most promising mitigation opportunities.
According to Maduekwe, Nigeria as global methane champion, has identified methane as one of the greenhouse gases that should be tackled.
She said the focus was to reduce methane, a short-term lived climate pollutant, also called super pollutants.
Maduekwe said that Nigeria had identified three sectors: oil and gas, agriculture and waste as focus areas in reducing methane emissions.
“We know that if you do not measure something, you are not able to know what it is you need to do; and so, we have understood that monitoring, reporting and verification is very crucial to identifying how much methane we have been able to reduce as a country.
“So, that is why this is very important; this is the inception workshop to kick-start this project and you are very crucial stakeholders to ensure that Nigeria actually has an MRV specifically for short-lived climate pollutants.
“We all know what is happening in Rivers with the black carbon emissions; you touch things and they are black; it is affecting the health of children, adults and we are not even doing the calculation of how much methane is affecting our lives.
“So, when we talk about short-lived climate pollutants, we are talking about something that affects you as a human being; yes, we are talking about greenhouse gases that although short-lived in air but their impact is so devastating compared to carbon dioxide,” she said.
Maduekwe said Nigeria would henceforth monitor the emissions, report them and seek how to verify them.
She said that the workshop would help to draw up guidelines for methane MRV so that at the end of 2025, Nigeria should be able know how much methane have been reduced among others.
Also speaking, Ms Catalina Etcheverry, Programme Management Officer, Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), said the coalition worked to mitigate short-lived climate pollutants including methane, hydro fluorocarbons, black carbon, as well as tropospheric ozone.
Etcheverry said the coalition supported countries that were signatories such as Nigeria in moving towards global methane reductions of at least 30 per cent by 2030.
“To limit warming to 1.5 degrees, countries have to work on significant reductions both on short-lived climate pollutants as well as on carbon dioxide (CO2) across all sectors by 2030.
“Short-lived climate pollutants are actually responsible for 45 per cent of current warming but stay in the atmosphere for a much shorter period than CO2.
“This means that the reductions in short-lived climate pollutants can achieve climate benefits within less than 20 years; it also has a host of co-benefits to livelihoods to health that we should account for.
“We are very pleased that Nigeria is now working on monitoring and tracking of progress of these short-lived climate pollutants across key sectors because it is essential to transparency and determines whether Nigeria is progressing on the longer-term goals of the Paris Agreement,” she said.
Head of Environment, SDN, Dr Jude Samuelson, said the workshop being funded by CCAC, was aimed at integrating the MRV into the national framework.
Samuelson said that the project was conceptualised to support the government of Nigeria to have a robust MRV framework which was necessary for short-lived pollutants with leading gases like methane and black carbon.
“The overall objective is to support the government of Nigeria to have increased capacity to incorporate SLCPs into the national MRV framework to support accurate reporting,” he said.