As the world marks the 2025 Environment Day, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has appealed to the World Bank for support on capacity building, data, and addressing the challenges posed by Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) in the country.
Head of Department, National Accounts Energy and Environment at NBS, Dr. Baba Madu, made the appeal at the 2025 Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) Conference on Thursday in Abuja.
The conference was organised with support from World Bank, in collaboration with NBS and the Federal Ministry of Environment.
While stating that NCA was a new area Nigeria must exploit to boost the country’s economy, Madu said for Nigeria to grow and be at par with other developed nations, there was a need to account for its natural resources.
He said, “NCA has been tasked with the crucial role of integrating natural capital into economic measurement. It is impossible to measure the economy accurately without accounting for natural resources. Issues such as environmental degradation, afforestation, desertification, and climate change all directly impact productivity.
“Productivity, in turn, influences output – one of the core components of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These environmental factors must be reflected across all economic activity sectors to present a more accurate picture of national output.”
While stating that Nigeria currently had data on NCA, the NBS official, however, raised concerns over a huge data gap from relevant Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) in the environment sector.
He said, “We are not doing badly but we need to improve on what we are doing. In terms of data sources, I can tell you there’s a big gap because these are new areas needed to be exploited.”
Programme Leader on Sustainable Development at the World Bank, Vina Vutukuru, said there was need to jointly explore the vital role of national accounting in national development plans and to brainstorm on how Nigeria could institutionalise it.
Vutukuru said, “Establishing the national capital accounting as part of the national account system will allow us to measure the economic value of ecosystem services, such as clean air, water and biodiversity, which are essential for our well-being and economic prosperity.”
Vutukuru commended Nigeria for having “very bold ambitions” as far as responding to climate change was concerned, saying, “That shows the commitment of the policy makers here towards the issue of climate.
“But I think to back up that aspiration and the aggressive goals that Nigeria has set for itself, the foundational thing for those goals to materialise, those objectives to come true, is a very strong natural account system.”
Head of Media, National Council on Climate Change Secretariat (NCCCS), Chioma Azie, who represented the Director General, Dr. Nkiruka Maduekwe, at the event, described Nigeria as a very ambitious country, stressing that natural resources are instrumental to achieving all the objectives of climate action.
Maduekwe stated, “Technology, policy reforms, behavioural changes have a role to play but natural resources are very key because they’re underpinning the mitigation and adaptation for climate action.
“If you look at Nigeria’s NDC, the NCA is an avenue to provide raw materials that we could use to develop mitigation and adaptation strategies.
“If you look at what we have done in terms of this NDC in 2020, which is the second leg of the NDC, we identified a lot of mitigation activities within these mentioned sectors of ours.
“In agricultural sector we talked about smart agriculture. What is smart agriculture without natural resources?
“We talked about biomass, what is biomass without natural resources? We also spoke about land use changes and that is natural resources; we talked about natural solutions and we talked about also afforestation, reforestation. Those are mitigation potentials of our NDC. So, we cannot achieve our NDC without SEEA.
“What you cannot account for is recorded as if it is not done, so if we know what is existing in terms of the reservoirs we have for natural resources, it can inform the scope of the mitigation activities we’re going to be imputing in the NDC 3.0.”
Michael Olugbode
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