The Exacerbating Role of Population Growth in Carbon Dioxide Emission in Nigeria

It is commonly believed that rising population increases CO2 emissions especially in developing countries via increase in human activities.This study therefore, empirically investigates the relationship between population growth and CO2 emissions in Nigeria from 1986-2022.Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Bounds of cointegration, findings reveals that a long-run relationship does not exist among GDP per capita growth rate, the squared GDP per capita growth rate, annual growth rate of the population, fossil energy consumption, financial development, manufacturing value added and carbon dioxide emission over the period under study.The short-run regression result revealed that all the explanatory variables except the squared GDP per capita growth rate and financial development exerted a significant positive relationship with carbon dioxide emissions.Furthermore, the causality results showed the presence of a uni-directional causality running from annual growth rate of the population, fossil energy consumed, financial development and manufacturing value added to carbon dioxide emissions without a feedback effect.In light of the evidences, the study recommended among others, that government, businesses and citizens should diversify into other sources of energy like solar and wind energy which do not harm the environment so as to amplify the sustainability of the environment.