Climate Vulnerability, Household Energy Poverty, and Socio-Economic Inequality in Nigeria: Implications for Equitable Social Policy

Nigeria faces three development challenges: increasing climate vulnerability, widespread household energy poverty, and enduring socioeconomic inequality. However, little is known about how climate stress and energy deprivation affect distributional results. For Nigeria between 2000 and 2025, this study examines the long-term and short-term effects of rainfall variability, temperature variability, an energy poverty index (EPI), which is an equal-weighted composite of the population with access to clean fuels and cooking technologies and the population with access to electricity, inflation, real GDP per capita, and socioeconomic inequality, as measured by the Gini index. The results show a consistent long-term association between the variables using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds-testing method (bounds F-statistic = 7.565). Rainfall, inflation, and real GDP per capita are statistically negligible, but temperature has a long-term negative and statistically significant impact on the Gini index, while the energy poverty index has a positive sign that is significant at the 5% level. Every year, about 63.2% of the imbalance is addressed in the near term. Every diagnostic test is passed by the model. The results highlight the need for climate-resilient, equity-focused social policy in Nigeria by indicating that early energy-access gains have disproportionately benefited wealthier households and that climatic stress redistributes resources through complicated channels.