The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is accelerating plans for a regional carbon market, positioning it as a key tool to help close a $294 billion climate financing gap threatening the region’s economic stability and the livelihoods of millions.
The push was disclosed at a regional workshop held in Abuja to validate the framework for a West African carbon market platform, where officials warned that without urgent, coordinated action, climate change could force close to 32 million people across West Africa into internal displacement.
Speaking through ECOWAS Director for Environment and Natural Resources, Christophe Deguénon, and the ECOWAS Commissioner for Economic Affairs and Agriculture, Dr. Kalilou Sylla, painted a stark picture of the region’s climate trajectory, noting that temperatures across West Africa are projected to rise by between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius by 2050, a shift that would intensify droughts, flooding, coastal erosion, and food insecurity across the sub-region.
At the heart of the proposed carbon market platform is an attempt to correct what officials describe as chronic under-participation by West African countries in international carbon trading, despite the region’s considerable natural endowments.
According to Sylla, West Africa possesses more than 350 million hectares of agricultural land, alongside extensive forests, mangroves, and degraded landscapes that could be restored, all of which carry significant potential for generating high-quality, high-integrity carbon credits.
Yet the region has largely remained on the margins of global carbon markets, a gap Sylla attributed to weak regulatory structures, limited technical capacity, and insufficient monitoring and certification systems.
“According to World Bank estimates, nearly 32 million West African people could be forced into internal displacement as a result of climate impacts, making collective regional action imperative,” Sylla said.
He added, “West Africa has the assets. It has over 350 million hectares of agricultural land, vast forests and mangroves, and huge potential to restore degraded landscapes.
We can generate high-integrity carbon credits. Yet we remain underrepresented in international carbon markets due to gaps in regulation, technical capacity, monitoring, and certification.”
The $294 billion figure driving the initiative was first estimated in the ECOWAS Regional Strategy for Access to and Mobilization of Climate Finance, adopted in 2022. That strategy sought to quantify the scale of investment West Africa would require to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change.
However, officials say the gap has since widened. Following the submission of updated Nationally Determined Contributions, referred to as NDCs, 3.0, member states have raised their climate ambitions considerably, pushing the financing requirement even higher than originally projected.
It was this same 2022 regional strategy that first identified the need for a harmonized regional framework to operationalize Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which governs international cooperation on carbon markets and emissions trading, as a mechanism to help narrow the widening financing gap.
ECOWAS formally launched the regional process to build this framework in 2024, aligning it with both the bloc’s own Vision 2050 development blueprint and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.
The Abuja workshop represents a critical step in that process, bringing together regional stakeholders to validate the technical and regulatory framework that would underpin a harmonized, ECOWAS-wide carbon trading platform.
The initiative is designed not merely as a financing mechanism but as an institutional foundation that would allow member states to pool expertise, standardize certification, and negotiate collectively in international carbon markets areas where individual West African nations have historically struggled to compete on their own.
Nigeria’s Minister of Environment, Balarabe Lawal, lent strong backing to the initiative, framing it within the broader argument that West Africa bears a disproportionate burden of climate change despite contributing minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions.
“Climate change continues to pose significant threats to our economies, ecosystems, food security, livelihoods, and the well-being of our people. These shared challenges demand collective solutions,” Lawal said, in a statement delivered on his behalf by a director from his ministry.
The ECOWAS initiative arrives at a moment when Nigeria’s domestic carbon market is also gaining traction. In January, President Bola Tinubu approved the implementation and operationalization of Nigeria’s national carbon market framework, a policy the Federal Government projects could generate at least $3 billion annually by 2030.
The Director-General of the National Council on Climate Change, Tenioye Majekodunmi, said the framework would position Nigeria to participate more actively in carbon trading and would facilitate emissions allowance transactions across various sectors of the economy.
The timing of the ECOWAS push also coincides with strong global momentum in carbon pricing.
The World Bank reported in May that global revenues from carbon pricing mechanisms exceeded $107 billion in 2025, according to its 2026 State and Trends of Carbon Pricing report, underscoring the scale of financing that regions with strong carbon assets, like West Africa, are currently missing out on.
For ECOWAS, the validation of the regional carbon market framework marks an early but significant milestone in a broader strategy to unlock climate finance at scale.
If successfully operationalized, officials believe the platform could help transform West Africa’s vast forests, farmland, mangroves, and degraded landscapes from underused assets into a genuine source of climate resilience and economic opportunity while also giving the region a stronger, more unified voice in the rapidly expanding global carbon economy.
Whether the framework can move from validation to full implementation, however, will depend on member states’ ability to harmonise regulation, build technical and monitoring capacity, and attract the credibility needed to compete for high-integrity carbon credits on the world stage.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
West Africa is sitting on a paradox: it holds the natural assets of 350 million hectares of farmland, forests, and mangroves to generate serious carbon revenue, but weak regulation and technical capacity have kept it locked out of a global market that made over $107 billion in 2025.
ECOWAS’s push for a harmonized regional carbon platform is essentially an attempt to convert that untapped potential into real money, closing a $294 billion financing gap before rising temperatures displace up to 32 million people in the region.
This isn’t just an environmental policy; it’s a race to monetize resilience before the cost of inaction outpaces the region’s ability to pay for it.
