Lagos state governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu told a United Nations high-level meeting on climate action and the just transition that subnational governments need affordable, long-term financing. That financing, he said, would let cities act on flooding, rising seas and urban heat at the scale they actually require. He spoke at the gathering held alongside the 81st UN General Assembly session in New York on 24 September, appearing beside California governor Gavin Newsom.
“States, regions, and subnational governments are ready to deliver. We have the ambition. We have the responsibility,” Sanwo-Olu told delegates, framing the appeal as a readiness problem rather than a willingness one. His central request was aimed at development finance institutions, private investors and businesses: treat climate projects in emerging markets as genuine investment opportunities rather than as charitable spending.
The scale of Lagos’s exposure
Lagos carries the kind of exposure that makes the distinction matter. The city manages 5.2 million vehicles on its roads and processes more than 5,000 tonnes of solid waste daily. That infrastructure strain sits on top of a coastline already vulnerable to flooding, sea-level rise and extreme urban heat. Sanwo-Olu’s pitch to investors covered transportation, waste management, urban resilience and clean energy, the sectors where Lagos believes it can absorb capital productively rather than simply receive it as aid.
Newsom’s presence alongside Sanwo-Olu reflected a growing pattern of collaboration between Lagos and California on climate, energy, technology, trade and investment, according to officials briefed on the meeting. The pairing of a Nigerian megacity with one of the world’s largest subnational economies carried its own message. Cities and states, not only national governments, increasingly see themselves as the practical unit for climate deal-making.
Subnational climate diplomacy of this kind has grown steadily over the past several UN General Assembly sessions. Mayors and governors have concluded that national-level pledges alone move too slowly to address the infrastructure decisions cities actually have to make year by year. Lagos’s appearance alongside California fits that pattern. Both governments have positioned themselves as willing to negotiate directly with investors and development banks, rather than wait for national governments to broker climate finance on their behalf.
A financing gap most Global South cities share
Lagos’s appeal echoes a financing gap that cities and provinces across the Global South have raised repeatedly this year, as the costs of climate adaptation rise faster than the concessional finance available to meet them. Southeast Asia’s governments are living with a version of the same shortfall right now, managing a weeks-long haze emergency with firefighting resources that have had to be supplemented by aid from Japan.
Whether Sanwo-Olu’s appeal translates into actual commitments from the investors and institutions in the room remains an open question, one that will likely take months rather than a single UN session to answer. Lagos officials have signalled they intend to keep pressing the case at follow-up meetings through the rest of the UN General Assembly session. They argue that the cost of inaction, measured in flood damage and lost productivity, already exceeds what early financing would require.
The distinction Sanwo-Olu drew between investment and charity is not merely rhetorical for Lagos’s finance team. Grant funding tends to arrive in smaller amounts, tied to specific projects and often subject to donor priorities that shift from year to year. Investment capital, if it materialises at the scale Lagos is asking for, would let the city plan multi-year infrastructure programmes with more predictable funding. That would depend on convincing investors that resilience projects in a fast-growing African megacity carry an acceptable risk profile.
