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Nigeria showcases Gashaka Gumti National Park Forest Carbon Project at UNCCD COP17 – EnviroNews
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Nigeria’s emerging nature-based carbon market story took centre stage at the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, as the Gashaka Gumti National Park Forest Carbon Project was showcased during the Business4Land (B4L) Forum’s Finance Day.
The project was featured during the high-level conversation, “Leading Change, One Hectare at a Time,” held at the Action Dome in the Blue Zone, bringing the Nigerian experience of protected-area conservation, community engagement and carbon finance into an international conversation on how to de-risk and scale land restoration.
The B4L Forum, convened as part of the COP17 Action Agenda, brought together business, government and financial actors around the challenge of translating commitments on land restoration into actual hectares restored. The official programme identified a substantial financing gap for land restoration, noting that global needs were estimated at US$355 billion annually against approximately US$77 billion in current finance. The Forum was consequently designed to make the case for land as an investable asset class and to explore instruments and partnerships capable of moving capital into restoration.
Representing Africa Nature Investors (ANI) Foundation and the Nigerian National Park Service, Horsfall Tony, Stakeholder Engagement Manager for the project, used the platform to demonstrate how the project is seeking to address one of the central risks confronting nature-based investments: ensuring that the communities living around and within landscapes targeted for restoration have a meaningful stake in the outcomes.
“For us, de-risking has meant putting communities at the centre of our project, ensuring they share tangible benefits from conservation, it makes socioeconomic sense to them and improves their livelihoods,” Tony said during the conversation.
The Gashaka Gumti model is designed around the principle that conservation becomes more durable when local communities see a direct connection between protecting the landscape and improving their own livelihoods. Under the project’s design, up to 60 percent of profits from carbon-credit revenues is intended to be invested back into communities.
For Tony, this is more than a benefit-sharing mechanism. It is an approach to managing project risk by transforming communities from potential beneficiaries or affected stakeholders into active custodians of the restoration effort.
“When communities see a leap or shift from land restoration to restoration of their own livelihoods, it inspires their trust and confidence,” he explained. “They take ownership and become the safeguards and guardrails of the project.”
The Gashaka Gumti Forest Carbon Project is being developed by Africa Carbon Partners (ACP) for and with the Africa Nature Investors (ANI) Foundation and the National Park Service of Nigeria. The project is located within Nigeria’s largest national park, the Gashaka Gumti National Park, a landscape of exceptional ecological importance.
The official COP17 panel brief describes Gashaka Gumti as covering approximately 600,000 hectares, with the carbon project targeting approximately 12 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent in removals while engaging more than 150,000 people across roughly 70 surrounding settlements. The project uses Assisted Natural Regeneration alongside conservation and carbon-credit generation, with a dedicated community endowment mechanism intended to translate conservation into tangible benefits for local residents.
The project therefore arrived in Mongolia not simply as a carbon project, but as a case study in the emerging effort to connect carbon finance, biodiversity conservation, land restoration and community development.
Tony also highlighted the importance of the long-term partnership between ANI Foundation and the National Park Service. ANI Foundation, an international conservation organisation committed to the management and restoration of protected areas with outstanding biodiversity value, and the National Park Service, a parastatal under Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Environment mandated to protect the country’s national parks, have entered into a 30-year renewable partnership to jointly protect and restore Gashaka Gumti.
According to Tony, this type of public-private cooperation is one of the foundations upon which restoration projects of scale can be built.
But he also delivered a second message from Gashaka Gumti to the international investment community: good intentions alone will not restore landscapes at the scale required. Finance must reach projects capable of delivering measurable impact.
He called for patient early-stage capital capable of supporting projects through the period between restoration activity and the generation of environmental revenues. He also acknowledged the support received through FSD Africa’s CAPE programme, which has supported the Gashaka Gumti project.
Tony argued that the next frontier is stronger market certainty.
“If restoration projects can secure pre-financing and credible long-term purchase commitments for their environmental outcomes,” he said, “communities can invest with confidence, project developers can scale, and conservation moves from a pilot to a viable asset class.”
The message resonated strongly with the central theme of the B4L Forum: de-risking land restoration so that capital can move from commitments to hectares.
The official panel itself brought together four distinct approaches to restoration and scale: EU policy and finance, SEKEM’s long-running desert restoration and business model in Egypt, Yuhan-Kimberly’s more than two decades of tree-planting investment in Mongolia, and the community-centred carbon-finance model emerging from Gashaka Gumti in Nigeria.
For Nigeria, the significance of the Gashaka showcase extends beyond the COP17 stage.
It places one of Africa’s major protected landscapes within a global conversation increasingly focused on how restoration can become financially viable, socially legitimate and scalable. It also demonstrates the potential for Nigeria’s protected areas to become platforms for integrated climate, biodiversity and livelihood outcomes when conservation is supported by appropriate partnerships and innovative finance.
As COP17 continues under the theme “Restoring Land, Restoring Hope,” the Gashaka Gumti story offers a distinctly Nigerian contribution to that global narrative: restoration is more likely to endure when the people living around the land can see themselves not merely as participants in conservation, but as shareholders in its success.
And from the Action Dome in Ulaanbaatar, Nigeria has placed that proposition firmly on the international stage.