Energy Consumption, Urbanisation and Ecological Footprint in Nigeria: Evidence from Fourier Quantile ARDL Approach
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Abstract
Despite the rising awareness of sustainable development, environmental degradation in Nigeria has worsened due to increased urbanisation and energy demand, which have caused ecological pressure. Previous literature has investigated the relationship between energy use and air quality. However, studies rarely examine the non-linear and asymmetric effects and impulse response of renewable energy and urbanisation on ecological footprint using sophisticated econometric methods. This study examines the impact of renewable energy consumption and urbanisation on Nigeria's ecological footprint from 1990 to 2024 using the Fourier Quantile Autoregressive Distributed Lag (FQARDL) method. The FQARDL framework can account for structural changes and heterogeneous effects across conditional distributions of ecological footprint and, as such, offers more substantial empirical evidence than conventional linear models. The empirical results show that in both the short and long run, the use of renewable energy significantly decreases ecological footprint, suggesting that the more renewable energy is adopted, the more sustainable Nigeria's environment would be. In contrast, urbanisation has a positive and statistically significant influence on ecological footprint, indicating that urban growth is associated with environmental degradation, due to its positive impact on energy consumption, infrastructure growth and resource extraction. The findings also indicate that GDP per capita and its squared term remain positive acrossall quantiles, suggesting that Nigeria is not yet at the 'upside-down' stage of the Environmental Kuznets Curve. Moreover, the causality analysis shows that there is a bi-directional relationship between the consumption of renewable energy and ecological footprint, and the relationship between urbanisation and ecological footprint is unidirectional. The study supports increased investment in renewable energy generation, sustainable urban development and stronger environmental policies to mitigate environmental degradation and achieve long-term environmental sustainability in Nigeria.
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