Turning Emissions Data into Accountability: Lessons from Nigeria’s EITI Experience

Blog post
25 November 2025
- Tengi George-Ikoli
- Ahmad Abdulsamad
- Robert Pitman
- Abdulmumin Abubakar

The extractive industry can no longer treat climate risk as an afterthought. It is now central to how stakeholders assess the sector. With the 2023 revision of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) Standard, emissions disclosures and climate-related risks are now core requirements for natural resource governance.

This shift reflects growing recognition that environmental performance is essential to maintaining competitiveness and citizen benefits. Without strong attention to emissions data, governments risk losing market access and accountability actors are unable to hold companies and regulators accountable for their emissions reduction commitments.

Recognizing this evolution, NRGI collaborated with the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) to integrate these new EITI requirements into the Nigeria’s extractive audit process, a first step in transforming emissions data from a technical process into a governance and accountability tool. NRGI took the next step in ensuring that data could be translated into corporate accountability.

Making emissions data count

Meeting the new standard required more than just a policy tweak. Together, NRGI and NEITI developed a standardized greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reporting template, now integrated into NEITI’s audit process. This enables oil, gas and mining companies to report emissions consistently, especially methane, a potent but often overlooked climate pollutant.

During NEITI’s 2022 and 2023 audit cycles, 15 of 62 oil and gas companies and 6 of 85 solid minerals companies submitted emissions data using the reporting template. For the first time, NEITI brought company emissions data into one public domain, a landmark moment for Nigeria’s transparency framework.

Turning methane emissions data to action in Nigeria

This early success provides a model for embedding climate accountability within existing oversight systems in Nigeria and around the world. Beyond fulfilling EITI obligations, emissions disclosures are now a foundation for informed oversight and public engagement.

NRGI’s approach in Nigeria has focused on using methane emissions data to support action, recognizing that transparency is not the destination, but the vehicle that can enable three forms of accountability:

1. Empowering oversight and public discourse

A sufficiently informed ecosystem of accountability actors, spanning civil society, media, government oversight institutions, and legislators, is essential to driving government and corporate accountability in emissions governance. NRGI advances this through targeted capacity-building workshops and policy dialogues, collaborating with global and national experts to empower these actors with NEITI emissions disclosures, Oil & Gas Methane Partnership (OGMP) 2.0 frameworks, International Energy Agency (IEA) Methane tracker and United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) satellite data.

This knowledge equips them to interpret corporate trends, industry shifts, and emissions drivers, fostering analytical skills, advocacy strategies, and consensus-building for informed public discourse. For oversight institutions, it shifts monitoring from assumptions to evidence-based scrutiny, enabling regulators to track emission reduction compliance and push for policies that align with global climate goals. In turn, it strengthens national emissions inventories and improves United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reporting.

Use Case I: Empowering communities, media, and parliament with data-driven advocacy and oversight reform

NRGI’s engagement and empowerment of stakeholders through capacity-building and stakeholder dialogues is yielding advocacy outcomes, including grassroots mobilization and high-level reform. Equipping journalists with NEITI emissions data through hands-on workshops have sparked investigative reports and radio series that heighten public awareness, provoke corporate accountability, and ignite debates on methane abatement and Nigeria’s gas expansion pathways. In communities, empowered local leaders channel this knowledge into townhall forums, anchoring dialogues with industry and officials in evidence to advocate for policies that harmonize national gas expansion goals with their lived realities. Civil society allies, fortified by NRGI’s guidance, then amplify these insights in multi-stakeholder policy roundtables, weaving community narratives into institutional agendas. This integrated momentum reached a pivotal juncture in NRGI’s multistakeholder dialogue, where the House Committee on Gas pledged collaborative action with these diverse actors to embed transparency and accountability across the oil and gas value chain.

2. Driving public finance accountability

Emissions data reveal the financial and policy risks associated with the energy transition, from compliance with the EU methane regulation to investor expectations and the danger of stranded assets. It also provides a factual basis for evaluating whether budget and fiscal targets align with Nigeria’s emission reduction pledges. Aligning budget projections and targets with climate goals signals a genuine commitment to environmental governance, builds credibility with climate finance providers, and prevents the loss of trust, funding and reputation that misalignment can cause. To strengthen this link, NRGI and the Paradigm Leadership Support Initiative (PLSI) developed the Emissions Monitoring and Accountability Tool (EMAT).

Use Case II: Informing policy and strengthening oversight

NRGI and Paradigm Leadership Support Initiative's (PLSI) Emissions Monitoring and Accountability Tool (EMAT) integrates NEITI data with budget tracking to assess whether government institutions are financially backing climate commitments. The tool’s PFM component analyses fiscal policies, expenditure allocations, and climate finance flows, exposing gaps (e.g., underfunded methane reduction programs) and holding government agencies accountable.

3. Tracking company and government performance

Using NEITI’s disclosures as a base, NRGI and partners such as BudgIT, CJID, News Central, Cable News Nigeria, Policy Alert, PLSI, NAPPDRR (Network Advancement Program for Poverty and Disaster Risk Reduction) have expanded emissions oversight into the public domain. By combining NEITI data with external datasets, expert reports, and media analysis, these partners assess whether corporate and government actions match stated reduction targets and bring their findings to public attention. This approach strengthens oversight, enables cross-sector analysis, and fuels a more informed public conversation on emissions governance in Nigeria

Use Case III: Tracking corporate compliance and driving public accountability

Through joint efforts with BudgIT, Policy Alert, News Central, PLSI, NAPPDRR and Cable News, NRGI analyzed corporate emissions data and published performance trends for Nigeria’s oil and gas companies. The resulting media coverage revealed gaps in corporate reporting and prompted companies to provide clarifications. By grounding this scrutiny in credible data, the initiative has reinforced transparency standards and pushed companies to align more closely with their public climate commitments.

Why it matters

NRGI and NEITI's foundational work makes emissions data accessible through standardized reporting templates. This has transformed previously fragmented industry reports into unified public assets that stakeholders, from regulators to local communities, can use to understand and compare emissions performance. It also empowers lawmakers and oversight actors to probe corporate claims using sources like satellite imagery, and push for stronger action on emissions reduction.

The implications are far-reaching and strategic:

Policy alignment. Emissions data supports policy alignment by linking extractive sector oversight to climate targets and bolstering the credibility of Nigeria’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
Accountability and climate finance access. Transparent data heightens compliance, sharpens parliamentary engagement and lays the groundwork for targeted methane mitigation through high-impact abatement identification, essential for unlocking climate finance and advancing Nigeria's energy transition.
Data-driven innovation. These disclosures pave the way for an updated Nigerian Gas Flare Tracker. Such an upgrade extends beyond the limited focus of the current tool on carbon to fuse NEITI GHG disclosures with satellite data, pinpointing flaring volumes, abatement potentials, and flaring hotspots, enabling precise, transformative interventions.

Scaling the model from Nigeria to the world

NRGI and NEITI will continue to refine the emissions reporting template to allow disaggregation by project type, asset class, and production volume. These upgrades will improve the analytical power of disclosures, reveal emissions hotspots and highlight which operations need greater regulatory focus.

Stakeholders must continue exploring ways to combine emissions data with production and revenue information to examine production-emissions linkages, regulatory gaps, and corporate behaviour across the extractives value chain.

The inclusion of emissions data in extractive audits should no longer be an exception. It must become a global norm that is replicated, expanded, and institutionalized across all EITI-implementing countries and beyond.