Cross River State REDD+ Readiness Programme (Nigeria)

Cross River State (CRS), home to roughly half of Nigeria's remaining tropical high forest, was chosen as Nigeria's demonstration state for REDD+. Governor Liyel Imoke imposed a one-year statewide logging moratorium in 2008, later extended indefinitely, and the state created a Forestry Commission in 2010 to anchor readiness work. From around 2011-2012 CRS became the pilot site under Nigeria's national UN-REDD Programme, with a US$4 million readiness allocation for 2012-2015 (financed largely through Norway-backed UN-REDD/Multi-Partner Trust Fund channels) and later a Green Climate Fund readiness grant. The state's REDD+ office produced a Forest Reference Emission Level and REDD+ Strategy submitted to the UNFCCC in 2017, and the Civil Society/community REDD+ (CBR+) mechanism funded 12 community-based projects run by 12 civil-society organisations.

The evidence on results is sobering. Cross River Watch's investigation documents that state forest cover fell from 7,920 km2 to 6,102 km2 between 1991 and 2008 — a decline that predates and coincides with the moratorium's introduction — and that a Dangote Group subsidiary secured sanction for over 75,000 hectares of agricultural land at the same time communities faced a logging ban, a widely cited contradiction. African Arguments (2023) reports Cross River State lost roughly 9% of its tree cover since 2000, with illegal logging and alleged official complicity continuing despite the ban; the chair of the state's Anti-Deforestation Task Force resigned after impounded timber was released against his objections, and the Task Force was later dissolved. A 2019 UNDP/Green Climate Fund concept note still described Cross River as 'seeking' future access to results-based carbon payments — no source found confirms any such payment was ever actually disbursed. The state formally lifted the logging moratorium in 2023, and civil-society groups (NCF Nigeria) described deforestation as still 'escalating' in 2025, holding a stakeholder conference on the crisis in Calabar that July. A peer-reviewed livelihoods study (Sustainability, MDPI) examined the programme's community impacts directly.

We include this practice deliberately as a cautionary case: it shows what fourteen years of internationally-funded REDD+ 'readiness' can look like when enforcement, political continuity and results-based finance never materialise — technical planning documents (FREL, strategy) were produced, but the underlying forest-protection measure was abandoned and deforestation continued largely unabated throughout.

Read the full analysis: https://www.un-redd.org/post/safeguarding-nigerias-paradise-cross-river-states-experiences-and-lessons-redd