Effect of Climate Change on Nigerian Economic Sustainability

Abstract

Climate change is seen as a statistical variation that persists for an extended period, frequently for as long as a decade or more. Moreover, the issue of climate change which has gained global attention poses a serious threat to developing economy like Nigeria, which is characterized by widespread poverty as a result of economic instability. It is against this backdrop that this research is aimed at investigating the effect of climate change on Nigerian economic sustainability. The research made use of Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL)/bond test approach and OLS estimation technique, while data for the period of 1990-2020 was collected. Changes in average temperature and carbon emission were used to capture climate change, while variation in exchange rate and agricultural production were used as control variables. The result of the analysis showed that the goodness-of-fit (R-Square) is 0.998. This means that 99.8% of the changes in the dependent variable (GDP) can be explained by the changes in the independent variables (CEM, AGRIC, EXR, TEMP). The annual speed of adjustment from short run to long run relationship is 34%. At F-statistic = 195.8052 and P value = 0.000, the model is statistically significant at 1% level. The results of the analysis further demonstrated that both in long-run and short-run, carbon emissions adversely affect Nigerian economic sustainability. Additionally, average atmospheric temperature was significantly related to sustainability of Nigerian economy in the short run. It was concluded that environmental stakeholders as well as Nigerian government should develop and enforce policies to reduce carbon emissions and forest depletion. Also, efforts should be made by government towards ensuring that policies that are environmentally friendly are made that can encourage agricultural production in order to reduce import of agricultural produce, thereby boosting economic growth.