Quantifying the heterogeneous impacts of green innovation and renewable energy transition on climate pressure in Nigeria

As countries intensify efforts to address climate change and advance sustainable development, understanding the effectiveness of green innovation and renewable energy transition in achieving climate goals has become increasingly important. Climate pressure is measured as the ecological footprint per capita, an indicator of the biologically productive land and sea area needed to support a population's consumption and absorb its waste. Previous research in this context, however, mostly employs mean-based estimators that do not account for potential conditional heterogeneity. This study investigates the distributional effects of green innovation and renewable energy transition on climate pressure in Nigeria. Green innovation is proxied by internet users as a share of the population, and renewable energy transition by the share of renewable electricity generation. The QARDL model is applied to annual data from 1990 to 2023, and the results show a stable long-run relationship between the variables. The findings also reveal strong heterogeneity in this relationship across the distribution of climate pressure. Green innovation and renewable energy sources are associated with a decrease in climate pressure in both the short and long run. Long-run elasticities range from - 0.087 at the tenth percentile to - 0.198 at the ninetieth percentile for green innovation, and from - 0.054 to - 0.141 for renewable energy. At higher climate pressure levels, the environmental gains of green innovation and renewable energy transition are significant. The Toda-Yamamoto causality test also suggests a unidirectional relationship from green innovation to climate pressure. Investment in digital infrastructure, clean technology and renewable energy deployment should therefore be prioritised. This is especially true during periods of high environmental stress, when climate benefits are highest. Such measures can make significant contributions toward climate and sustainable development goals in Nigeria. This is the first study to jointly estimate long-run, short-run, and error-correction dynamics across the full distribution of climate pressure for this nexus in a single African economy. The climate benefit of digital and renewable investment is shown to roughly double in strength exactly when environmental pressure is most severe.