Nigeria's Ambitious Forest Economy Plan: Unlocking $2 Billion for Sustainable Development
Nigeria is embarking on a significant initiative to leverage its vast forest resources, aiming to unlock $2 billion from its forest economy. This ambitious strategy is designed to achieve multiple critical objectives: combat rampant deforestation, stimulate job creation, and enhance financial inclusion across the nation.
Key Drivers and Objectives:
Addressing Deforestation: Nigeria faces an alarming rate of deforestation, with Vice President Kashim Shettima recently stating at the 2025 Nigeria Forest Economy Summit that over 90% of the country's original forest cover has been lost. This initiative directly addresses this environmental crisis.
Job Creation: The plan focuses on developing underutilized sectors within the forest economy. This includes promoting sustainable forestry practices, value addition to forest products, and potentially expanding industries related to non-timber forest products. The Vice President noted that over 70% of non-timber forest product collectors are women and youth, highlighting the potential for empowering these demographics and scaling millions of jobs through women-led cooperatives and youth-driven enterprises.
Financial Inclusion: A crucial aspect of this strategy is to integrate financial services into forest-based livelihoods. This aims to improve access to credit, savings, insurance, and digital tools, particularly for the estimated 30 million financially excluded Nigerians who often rely on forest resources for their livelihoods.
Economic Diversification and Revenue Generation: The $2 billion target represents the immediate potential within Nigeria's forest sector. Experts at the summit suggested that with proper management and large-scale "forest industrialization," the sector could generate between $5.3 billion and $10.5 billion annually. Even a conservative $2 billion translates to over N3 trillion, a sum exceeding the annual budget of most Nigerian states.
Carbon Credits and Global Markets: A significant component of this plan is Nigeria's aggressive push into the global carbon credit market. Nigeria aims to produce up to 30 million carbon credits annually by 2030, potentially earning over $2 billion from this sector alone by that time. This aligns with new European Union regulations that will prohibit imports from recently deforested land, emphasizing the urgency for Nigeria to adopt sustainable forest management to maintain access to valuable international markets.
Attracting Investment: The government is working to align over 1,100 forest reserves and national parks with strategic investments, aiming to unlock up to $3 billion in overall value from the forest sector. They are also developing a "Carbon Market Activation Policy" and a "Global Climate Change Investment Fund" to attract public and private capital for green infrastructure and clean energy solutions.
The initiative is being championed by the Presidential Committee on Economic and Financial Inclusion (PreCEFI) secretariat in the Office of the Vice-President. The 2025 Nigeria Forest Economy Summit, themed "Sustainability of Nigeria's Forests: Unlocking the $2 Billion Potentials for Economic and Financial Inclusion," served as a platform to underscore the urgency and potential of this sector.
Nigeria's Q1 2025 Economic Performance:
In related economic news, Nigeria's economy saw a robust expansion in the first quarter of 2025.
GDP Growth: According to the latest report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released on Monday, July 21, 2025, Nigeria's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by 3.13% year-on-year in real terms in Q1 2025. This represents an improvement from the 2.27% growth recorded in the corresponding period of 2024, indicating a strengthening of economic activity.
Rebased Data: This growth figure is based on newly rebased GDP data, which shifted the base year for calculations from 2010 to 2019. This rebasing exercise aims to better capture current production and consumption trends and improve fiscal metrics. Following this rebasing, Nigeria's nominal GDP for 2024 is now estimated at N372.8 trillion ($243.7 billion).
Sectoral Contributions: The NBS report indicated that the economic performance in Q1 2025 was primarily driven by the services sector, which contributed significantly to GDP (58.04% in the rebased 2019 data) and grew by 4.3%. Other notable contributions came from the industry sector (which grew by 3.42%), with oil production increasing to an average of 1.62 million barrels per day. The agriculture sector, however, recorded a marginal 0.07% increase, though this was a recovery from a contraction in Q1 2024.
Implications: While the 3.13% growth is positive, it fell short of some market analysts' forecasts of 4.9%. Despite the increased nominal GDP, Nigeria remains the fourth-largest economy in Africa, behind South Africa, Egypt, and Algeria, partly due to the depreciation of the Naira.
This combination of ambitious plans for the forest economy and steady, albeit cautious, GDP growth signals Nigeria's multifaceted approach to economic development and environmental sustainability.
I'm Aisha shehu
Talksocialtalka News
