The Nasarawa State government is working to develop a climate investment platform to actualise a clean energy transition plan.
The managing director of the State Investment and Development Agency (NASIDA), Ibrahim A. Abdullahi, disclosed this during Monday’s stakeholders’ engagement on the issue in Lafia.
Abdullahi said that to this end, the state has secured a $160,000 grant from the African Climate Foundation with the assistance of Murty International Limited.
“It is the first of its kind; there is no Nigeria state that has developed a climate investment platform before, that makes Nasarawa the first to do so,” he stated.
He said the Climate Investment Platform would serve as a centralised hub for coordinating climate investment, policy development and capacity building, facilitating the state‘s transition towards a climate-resilient economy.
“It is a significant step towards actualising our ambition for a clean energy transition. The impact of climate change on our livelihood cannot be overemphasised. We have all seen how flood-related hazards continue to impact our environment negatively. This also affected economic activities directly or indirectly.
“The resources that can be deployed towards addressing social infrastructure are continuously being deployed to address flood challenges and other climate-related issues. We can dip this in the bud by ensuring that investment and projects from the planning stage are climate resilient and friendly and key to our overall ambition to ensure that our economic and otherwise activities should make the environment safer,” he said.
He assured that NASIDA, in collaboration with other partners, would use the opportunity provided by the African Climate Foundation to benefit the state’s people.
Also speaking, Dr Adnan Umar, a climate-smart agriculture specialist and consultant for Murty International, which is anchoring the delivery of the project for Nasarawa State, said the stakeholders’ engagement was intended to have the buy-in of the programme’s beneficiaries.
“You cannot develop a policy document without engaging the people that will benefit from it; that is what the current engagement is all about.
For any policy document to be active, it needs the input of the people it is targeting right from the onset,” he stated.
He said the policy document would be ready before the end of March 2025. “And it is not just a document but a basket of climate projects that we aimed to bring to Nasarawa State that will positively impact the people‘s lives.”
