The Nigeria Socio-Ecological Alternatives Convergence and the West Africa Climate Justice Roundtable held in Abuja on July 14 and 15, 2025, brought together civil society actors, academics, frontline communities, and campaigners to take stock of the ecological and political conditions shaping Nigeria’s climate crisis. Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) participated in both meetings, contributing to the critique of extractive systems and the rejection of market-based and technocratic responses to climate change.
Discussions at both convenings were clear: the region remains a sacrifice zone for fossil fuel and mineral extraction, while the same political and economic class responsible for the crisis continues to flirt with false solutions dressed up as innovation.
So-called solutions to the climate crisis—such as Smart Agriculture, REDD+, carbon credits, and geoengineering—were critically examined at the meeting and exposed as instruments of green dispossession. Despite being framed as transitional measures, participants argued that these approaches do not confront the structural drivers of the crisis. Instead, they entrench extractive economies, displace communities, and postpone the urgent need to dismantle the systems of accumulation and exploitation that created the crisis in the first place.
Three key drivers were identified as central to the ecological crisis across West Africa. These include decades of oil and mineral exploitation, worsening climate shocks including sea level rise and desertification, and biodiversity loss driven by monoculture plantations and land grabs. The West African Gas Pipeline was highlighted as a major project that has intensified environmental degradation and heightened socio-economic tensions in coastal communities. One of the core demands was its immediate termination.
There was broad agreement that any response to the climate crisis that does not include a decisive end to fossil fuel expansion cannot be taken seriously. Regional governments were called to prioritise community rights, shift public resources away from fossil infrastructure, and support distributed renewable energy systems under public and community control.
CAPPA restated its position that climate action in Nigeria cannot be reduced to a question of emissions metrics. The ecological crisis is layered into existing problems such as land dispossession, water privatisation, food insecurity, and economic precarity. In such a context, climate justice must mean structural transformation, not adaptation within the limits of extractive capitalism.
CAPPA’s position was echoed in broader calls for resource democracy and an end to elite capture of natural resources, with a demand for control to be returned to the communities most affected. These calls also rejected the financialisation of nature, where land, forests, and ecosystems are reduced to carbon offsets for polluters in other parts of the world.
Strategic litigation, local capacity building, and frontline organising were highlighted as necessary instruments for holding governments and corporations to account.
Participants demanded that public policy on climate be opened to broader participation beyond private consultants and donor frameworks. Without community direction and ownership, climate policy risks reproducing the same exclusions and failures it claims to address.
For Nigeria, a just transition cannot be framed around private investment and deregulated carbon markets. It must be rooted in social guarantees that uphold livelihoods, food sovereignty, access to energy, and control over land and water. Anything less is not transition, but continuity.
