Impact of industrialisation on CO2 emissions in Nigeria

Developing countries, including Nigeria, aim to achieve industrialisation and sustainable development. However, there are few empirical studies that examined the impact of industrialisation-led economic transformation on carbon emissions in developing countries. This is the focus of this study. The paper investigates the impact of industrial value-added on CO2 emissions in Nigeria using the Kaya Identity framework and Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF), Johansen's cointegration technique and vector error correction model (VECM). The data spans from 1980 to 2011. The result of the ADF test indicates that continual long term policies that exert permanent shocks on the variables are required to achieve economic development, industrialisation and CO2 reduction. The result of the analysis shows that industrial value-added has an inverse and significant relationship with CO2 emissions, which suggests that there is no evidence that industrialisation increases carbon emissions in Nigeria. GDP per capita and population has positive and significant impacts on CO2 emission. Energy intensity and carbon intensity has positive but very weak significant impact (at 10% level) on CO2 emission. The paper recommends that policy makers in Nigeria should pursue pragmatic industrialisation policies coupled with modest decarbonisation and energy-efficiency measures in order to ensure long term industrial, economic and sustainable development. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.