The nexus of population growth and deforestation on Carbon Dioxide emissions in Nigeria

Abstract

Supposedly, population growth and deforestation are said to increase greenhouse gases emissions, predominantly the CO2 emissions through the rise in human activities. Consequently, this paper aimed to examine this assertion in Nigeria by using Autoregressive Distributed Lag covering 1974-2016. ARLD bound test for co-integration was applied after confirming the existence of mixture of order of integration of the variables in the models via ADF and PP unit root tests, strong co-integration was obtained at 1% level of significance among the variables in the CO2 model. The outcomes showed that population growth alone cannot cause of CO2 emissions in the long run. However, deforestation was found to be responsible in increasing CO2
emissions in the long run. Though, in the short run, almost all the explanatory variables and their lags, (population growth, deforestation, and Urbanization) were found to be statistically significant in determining CO2 emissions except GDP that was observed to be insignificant. The results recommended that population growth, which is the focal point of the study, might only determine CO2 emissions in the short run. Hence, population control measures might be a short run effective measure to lesser the emissions level. Moreover, further research can be piloted on how to effectively and efficiently accomplish the population growth–CO2 emissions nexus.