Climate data infrastructure is having a moment across African cities. There is a lot of excitement about building digital climate platforms (GHG Registries, MRV systems, and carbon platforms), but technology alone is not enough. Many of these systems are being developed before the policies, institutions, standards, skills and processes needed to make them effective are fully in place. The technology has potential, but its real value must be demonstrated through actual use and measurable results.
Below are eight things worth understanding before a city commits to building a climate data system, followed by what separates a solution that survives contact with reality from one that becomes a well-designed document.
1. Data Collection Is the Easy Part. Data Governance Is the Actual Project.
It is straightforward to design a form, a schema, or a dashboard that captures emissions figures from companies. It is much harder to decide who has the legal authority to require that data, who verifies it, who can access it, and what happens when a reported number is wrong or disputed. Cities that start with the technical layer — the database, the identifiers, the UI — often discover midway through that the governance layer (legal mandate, verification protocol, dispute resolution) was the real bottleneck all along. Governance should be designed first, not backfilled once the system already has users.
How the LGHGR Has Addressed This
The LGHGR didn’t start with a dashboard. The LGHGR was established within the Lagos State Government institutional framework, with Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency (LASEPA) as the regulatory institution and TPHG Technologies as the technical, implementation and operational partner. The registry’s operational documents were also developed: LGHGR Guidelines, Regulations, and Governance Structure. These documents were sent out for validation to stakeholders across the manufacturing, commercial, education, and religious sectors.
What the LGHGR Is Exploring
The LGHGR continues to strengthen governance procedures around verification, data access, reporting responsibilities, and the treatment of disputed or inaccurate data.
2. A Local Registry Only Has Value If It Can Talk to National and International Systems.
A city-level emissions or entity registry that exists in isolation is not very useful beyond internal record-keeping. Its strategic value comes from interoperability — with national MRV frameworks, with international carbon market standards, with whatever compliance instrument a given country ultimately adopts. That means identifier schemas, classification standards (ISIC or equivalent), and reporting formats need to be built with alignment in mind from day one, not retrofitted later. A sub-national registry is more useful and defensible when it focuses on collecting reliable data and identifying projects to feed into the national system, rather than trying to act as a separate, overlapping authority.
How the LGHGR Has Addressed This
The LGHGR is being structured with standards in mind. Using structured classifications such as ISIC classifications, standard emission factors and unique identifiers for organisations, the registry is being designed with the possibility of connecting to wider MRV systems rather than operating as an isolated database. This reduces the technical barriers to future interoperability. Nigeria’s national MRV framework is still under development and not yet fully operational or integrated. As the first registry of its kind in the country, LGHGR is positioned for mutual knowledge-sharing as the national framework matures: LGHGR will align its design with national standards as they solidify, while its practical experience may also inform aspects of the national framework’s design.
What the LGHGR Is Exploring
Continued work on alignment with Nigeria’s national MRV architecture as it continues to develop and identifying opportunities for knowledge-sharing in both directions, adopting national standards as they solidify, and contributing lessons from LGHGR’s own design and implementation experience.
3. Classifying Economic Activity Is Harder—and More Political—Than It Looks.
Assigning companies to standard industrial classification codes (like ISIC) looks like a clerical exercise, but it isn’t. In practice, a company that does several different things at once (e.g. manufacturing, logistics, waste handling) forces real decisions about its dominant activity, which category best represents it, and those decisions matter because they affect what the company has to report, what it pays, and how fairly different sectors are treated relative to each other. Cities should expect to spend real time getting this right, rather than treating it as a one-off data entry task.
How the LGHGR Has Addressed This
We have discovered that organisations aren’t always easy to classify. An organisation may have manufacturing, logistics, waste management or other activities, so determining the appropriate sector and reporting boundary requires judgment. The LGHGR has had to approach classification as more than a data-entry exercise and has adopted ISIC-based classification rather than simply grouping organisations informally.
What the LGHGR Is Exploring
We are continuing to refine classification of organisations with multiple activities, sector boundaries and how classification affects registration, reporting and other registry requirements.
4. The Line Between a “Fee” and a “Tax” Is a Legal Question, Not a Branding Question.
Many city- or state-level bodies do not have constitutional taxing authority, even when they have a clear environmental mandate. A registry that charges reporting entities, verifiers, or data users needs those charges properly defined and legally grounded as cost-recovery for a service. Getting this wrong doesn’t just risk legal challenge; it can undermine the legitimacy of the entire registry in the eyes of the entities it depends on for data. This is a conversation to have with legal counsel before a fee structure is ever communicated publicly, not after.
How the LGHGR Has Addressed This
The registry must distinguish service charges from taxation. The LGHGR has considered structured charges/fees around registration, annual subscription, audit and certification, rather than presenting the registry simply as a taxation mechanism. These structured fees have been presented carefully to the appropriate institutional/legal parties. This gives the registry a service-oriented framework around the activities it provides.
What the LGHGR Is Exploring
Continuing to strengthen the legal and institutional basis for the registry’s fee structure and ensuring that the framework is defensible and appropriately considered with the relevant authorities and legal advisers.
5. Data Quality Depends on Relationships With the Entities Being Asked to Report, Not Just on System Design.
The best-designed reporting portal will not produce good data if the companies feeding it don’t trust the process, don’t understand what’s being asked of them, or see no benefit in complying. Stakeholder engagement is not a soft add-on to the technical build; it’s part of what makes the data real. It means sitting with industry representatives, banks, verifiers, and regulators, and explaining what the registry is for, why it matters, and what’s expected of them. At the same time, trust and understanding are not enough on their own; the system itself also must be designed to catch errors before they become official records, since even a well-intentioned company can submit the wrong unit, miss a facility, or use an outdated emission factor.
How the LGHGR Has Addressed This
LGHGR has placed significant emphasis on stakeholder engagement. This includes engagement with private-sector organisations, public agencies, regulators, consultants, financial institutions, auditors/verifiers and other stakeholders. LGHGR’s operational documents also went through a consultative review process: drafts were sent to stakeholders across government and the private sector, including manufacturing, commercial, and other industries, for review, and their feedback was integrated into the final documents.
Training and guidance have also been developed to help reporting organisations understand registration and emissions reporting requirements. On the system side, LGHGR’s built-in emissions calculator computes emissions per activity source and in total rather than accepting a final figure directly from the reporting entity, and every submission passes through a registered third-party verifier before it counts toward an entity’s reporting obligation. Stakeholder engagement, training, onboarding, and these system-level checks are therefore not peripheral activities; they are part of data-quality architecture.
What the LGHGR Is Exploring
Continuous stakeholders’ engagement and education, training, and feedback mechanisms so organisations understand not only what to report, but why the data matters and how participation benefits them.
6. “Climate Data” Is Really Several Different Data Problems Wearing One Label.
Different components of climate data such as entity-level emissions reporting, equipment- and asset-level activity data, verification records, pricing and market data are distinct problems with different data models and different stakeholders. This is to show that there is more than one component of climate data, and a city that treats “climate data” as a single undifferentiated dataset will build a system that’s mediocre at all of them. Identifying the component to solve at a time will help the registry to produce a sharper, more buildable scope.
How the LGHGR Has Addressed This
Rather than trying to solve every climate-data problem at once, the LGHGR is not trying to be a generic climate-data platform. Its core focus is a Greenhouse Gas emissions registry and digital MRV system, with distinct components for activity data reporting and 3rd-party independent verification.
What the LGHGR Is Exploring
We are looking into how additional components, such as carbon projects, verification/accreditation, carbon pricing and other climate-data applications can connect to the registry without diluting its core purpose.
7. Most African Cities Are Data-Poor, Not Data-Absent.
The instinct is often to build new collections of mechanisms from scratch. But cities frequently already sit on adjacent datasets — business registries, licensing records, utility consumption data, customs and trade data — that can seed or cross-validate a climate data system at a fraction of the cost of starting cold. Auditing what already exists, even in imperfect or siloed form, is usually more productive than a green-field build.
How the LGHGR Has Addressed This
The opportunity is to connect what already exists. LGHGR has recognised the importance of existing organisational and emissions-related information and is building a structured database of organisations within relevant Lagos sectors. The registry has developed a facility checklist, a standard activity data collection template, and a facility equipment inventory checklist for different activities. The registry also uses existing standards and information sources such as ISIC classifications and emission-factor databases, rather than creating every standard from scratch.
What the LGHGR Is Exploring
A major area for further development is integrating and cross-validating existing government, utility, organisational, and other relevant datasets. This can reduce duplicate data collection and improve the quality of emissions information.
8. The Ultimate Value of Climate Data Is Action.
A city does not become climate-resilient simply because it has a large database. The real question is: What are we doing with the data? Good climate data should lead to better infrastructure, lower emissions, stronger resilience and smarter investment.
How the LGHGR Has Addressed This
The registry must demonstrate what the data changes. LGHGR was conceived not merely as a database, but as a tool for tracking, managing and verifying Greenhouse Gas emissions to support data-driven climate policy and Lagos’ low-carbon transition. The MRV structure is intended to turn organisational emissions data into information that can support decision-making. This is the most important future-facing point. The registry will ultimately demonstrate how emissions data informs policy, compliance, investment, emissions reduction and climate action.
What the LGHGR Is Exploring
The next step is demonstrating increasingly tangible policy, investment, emissions-reduction and compliance outcomes from the data, moving from “we have the data” to “this is what Lagos is doing because of the data.”
For African cities, climate data should not simply tell us where we are. It should help us decide where we will go next. These aren’t just lessons for African cities; they are challenges the LGHGR has encountered and is actively addressing.
