Exploring the association between the female gender, education expenditure, renewable energy consumption and CO2 emissions: Empirical evidence from Nigeria

The significance of women's contribution to attaining the Sustainable Development Goal of net zero emissions cannot be underestimated. Therefore, employing the ecofeminism theory, this research explores the effect of female gender, education expenditure and renewable energy consumption on carbon dioxide emissions in Nigeria between 1990 and 2019. The utilised methodologies include autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL), fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS), dynamic ordinary least square (DOLS) and canonical cointegrating regression (CCR). The cointegration tests showed evidence of long‐run association. The ARDL result revealed that female gender, education expenditure, and renewable energy consumption have a negative relationship with carbon dioxide emissions in the long run. This indicates that a rise in these variables is beneficial to the environment. In the short run, female gender and renewable energy consumption have a negative link with carbon dioxide emissions. For robustness check, the results obtained from the FMOLS, DOLS and CCR methods validate the ARDL findings. Furthermore, the frequency domain causality test established that the female gender has a one‐way causal influence on carbon dioxide emissions in the long, medium, and short term. Based on these outcomes, policy recommendations are further discussed.