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🇳🇬 Nigeria /Environment & Climate

Nigerian Sustainability Institute Urges Firms to Make Sustainability a Core Strategy

From The Punch · () English

Translated from English and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Named sources Context piece
  • The Sustainability Professionals Institute of Nigeria urged companies to integrate sustainability into business strategy rather than treat it as a reporting or compliance function.
  • Speakers at the institute’s Lagos conference said climate, economic, geopolitical, technological and regulatory pressures increasingly affect corporate decisions and valuations.
  • They called for broader sustainable finance and stronger professional skills in areas including data, climate risk, impact measurement and artificial intelligence.

Sustainability should not become another imported template imposed on Nigerian businesses, Prof. Kenneth Amaeshi told the first conference of the Sustainability Professionals Institute of Nigeria in Lagos.

“Let us not make sustainability another form of imperialism travelling around the world. We must contextualise it to meet our needs,” said Amaeshi, SPIN’s president. The conference brought together business executives, policymakers, investors, financial institutions and sustainability professionals under the theme “The Adaptive Enterprise: Sustainability Strategies for Challenging Times.”

Speakers argued that companies need to move environmental, social and governance issues out of separate reporting departments and into investment decisions, risk management, capital allocation and corporate governance. Kolawole Owodunni, executive director and chief investment officer of the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority, said companies face an unstable mix of economic volatility, climate change, geopolitical tension, technological disruption and regulatory change.

Let us not make sustainability another form of imperialism travelling around the world. We must contextualise it to meet our needs.

· Prof. Kenneth AmaeshiThe SPIN president called for sustainability frameworks adapted to Nigeria’s economic and institutional realities.

“Sustainability can no longer sit at the margins. It must be central to how organisations make decisions,” Owodunni said. He described the issue as a commercial concern for investors, since climate risks, resource limits, regulation and changing expectations can affect costs, supply chains, market access and company value.

Owodunni said sustainable finance should extend beyond green bonds to include governance, transparency and environmental and social risk management. He also pointed to potential investment opportunities in Africa’s structural challenges, including energy, healthcare, infrastructure and climate resilience. Sustainability professionals, he said, increasingly need financial, regulatory, data, climate-risk and impact-measurement expertise, together with knowledge of technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Sustainability can no longer sit at the margins. It must be central to how organisations make decisions.

· Kolawole OwodunniThe NSIA executive said sustainability should guide corporate decisions and investment.
About this summary

Originally published by The Punch in English. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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