Assessing the Role of Renewable Energy, Environmental Taxes, and Energy Use in Shaping Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Nigeria

Abstract

Amid persistent environmental pressures linked to energy dependence and structural inefficiencies, this study represents one of the first empirical attempts to concurrently investigate the effects of renewable energy, green technology, environmental taxes, economic growth, energy imports, and government effectiveness on greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) using data updated through 2024 for Nigeria’s evolving economy. Using the “Autoregressive Distributed Lag” (ARDL) approach with “Granger causality” analysis, the results confirm a stable long-run association between the indicators. Renewable energy and energy imports indicate a negative correlation with GHGE in both the near and long term, supporting Nigeria’s low-carbon transition. Economic growth reduces emissions in the near term but shows no significant long-run effect. Environmental taxes exhibit a weak positive association with emissions, reflecting enforcement and institutional limitations, while green technology and government effectiveness show negative but insignificant impacts. The causality findings reveal unidirectional links from environmental taxes to emissions and from emissions to government effectiveness. The results highlight the importance of strengthening renewable energy, diversifying energy sources, and enhancing institutional capacity to achieve sustainable environmental outcomes in Nigeria.

Keywords

Renewable energy / Green technology / Environmental tax / Energy importation / GHGE

Author Contributions

P.O.I. wrote the manuscript, while O.A.S. and H.O. administered and supervised the manuscript.

Ethics Statement

This paper does not contain any studies with human participants performed by the author.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Data sources have been made available in the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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