Integration of climate change mitigation and sustainable development planning: lessons from a national planning process in Nigeria

To limit global temperature increases to well below 2ºC, it is necessary that current national commitments to reduce emissions are increased, and these commitments are implemented. The identification of local development benefits from climate change mitigation is a possible motivating factor to achieve this. However, there is a lack of practical examples of how climate change mitigation and development priorities can be integrated in national planning processes, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

This work considers two questions i) What are the factors that have to be considered when developing a plan integrating greenhouse gas reductions with local development goals? and ii) How do you structure a process to reach a consensus about the plan itself? It does this by conceptualizing the integration of climate mitigation and development benefits as a policy intervention. As a case study, a national planning process that integrated climate change mitigation with improvements to air quality and human health in Nigeria is conceptualized, ex-post, as an intervention theory model.

This paper presents the following:

• Assessment of factors to integrate development priorities in climate change planning.
• Example of planning process on climate change and air quality in Nigeria evaluated.
• Process needs to respond to how development priorities used in budget allocation.
• Evidence provided by assessments of emission reduction for key mitigation actions.
• And implementation pathways that identify concrete actions for mitigation priorities.