Assessing the contribution of nuclear energy to the ecological footprint in China: the role of natural resource consumption and agricultural productivity dynamics

China’s rapidly expanding ecological footprint poses a critical threat to environmental sustainability. Yet the combined roles of natural resource use, nuclear energy, and agricultural inputs in driving this footprint remain insufficiently explored within a unified analytical framework. This study examines the relationships among natural resource consumption, nuclear energy use, agricultural productivity, and fertilizer use on the ecological footprint in China from 1990 to 2024. This study proposes the Method of Moments Quantile Regression for long-run estimation, which offers distinct advantages over conventional mean-based and OLS estimators by capturing distributional heterogeneity across quantiles. Bootstrap Quantile Regression and RLS methods are employed for robustness validation, while frequency-domain causality testing identifies directional causal links across time horizons. The results show that natural resource rents raise the ecological footprint by 0.038–0.040 units per 1 unit increase across all quantiles, while nuclear energy consumption reduces it by 0.053 − 0.050 units, with the mitigating effect strengthening at all quantiles. Agricultural productivity increases the footprint by 0.860–0.877%, and fertilizer consumption raises it by 1.35–1.51%, with effects intensifying at higher quantiles. Economic growth exerts the largest positive effect with elasticity ranging from 2.85 to 2.87%, while trade globalization consistently reduces the ecological footprint by 1.77–1.80% across all quantiles. These findings suggest that China should accelerate nuclear energy investment, implement resource-use regulations, reform fertilizer subsidies, and strengthen sustainable agriculture policies to meet its dual goals of carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.