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Abstract

The research empirically examines the dual determinants of agricultural CO2 emissions in Nigeria, identifying economic growth and energy poverty as the principal mechanisms of influence. Utilizing annual time-series data from 1990 to 2024, the analysis employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing methodology to identify long-run equilibrium relationships, supplemented by Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) and Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) for robustness verification. The long-term results show that economic growth has a positive and statistically significant effect on agricultural CO2 emissions by 3.97. This means that a 1% rise in GDP per capita is linked to a 3.97% rise in agricultural emissions. This big change in elasticity shows that as the economy grows, people are eating more emissions-intensive livestock products, farming more intensively, and making money from farming. Energy poverty, on the other hand, is not statistically significant in either the short or long term. This supports the idea that most of Nigeria's agricultural emissions come from biological sources, such as enteric fermentation, manure management, rice cultivation, and agricultural soils, rather than from energy sources. The error correction term of -1.258 and p < 0.01 shows that the system quickly returns to long-run equilibrium, fixing about 126% of the disequilibrium from the previous year. Robustness checks employing FMOLS and DOLS substantially corroborate these findings. So, in terms of policy, agricultural mitigation strategies should focus on income-driven consumption and intensification pathways instead of energy access interventions.